I fell in love with the sweater, but the yarn was so expensive. After months and months of deliberating, I gave in and bought their yarn and located a used copy of the book. The design is done in twisted stitches. Not being a hand knitter, though, I was not sure how to accomplish this on a machine. After doing some practice knitting using hand needles, I figured out what to do. It's much easier to achieve the same effect on a machine than by hand because you can see the design better so it's easier to know how to pass the stitches over one another. At least to me it is. Plus, hand knitters have to perform different operations to achieve the same effect depending on whether a purl or knit side is being worked. However, this is one instance where machine knitting is not necessarily faster than hand knitting.
Due to the nature of reforming stitches, you will be working your pattern one row below the row just knitted. That is to say, if row 3 has just been knitted, you will be looking at row 2 on the chart for the patterning. It's confusing at first, but think about how the loops on the needles can't be reformed in any meaningful way. There is no purl bump to be manipulated, so they must be formed a row behind. Also, because the middle of the pattern repeats in a different number of rows than that on either side, I found it enormously helpful to plot the full chart out as an excel spreadsheet, with all the pattern repeats, increases, and decreases in their appropriate places so I don't have to try to keep up with when to decrease, what row of which section of pattern to use, etc.
To get your basic twisted knit stitch, you need a seed stitcher. This is a latch tool with latches at both ends. When you reform your stitch, rotate the seed stitcher 180 degrees then proceed as normal. I don't know if this is technically the equivalent of an HK twisted stitch, but it looks like one and that's good enough for me. If the pattern calls for the stitches to be rearranged on the hand knitting needles, proceed on the machine as if you were forming cables. First, twist the stitches as previously described. Then, with your transfer tool, have the stitches trade places. You can do a one by one switch, a two by one switch, and maybe more but that's all I've done. You must pay attention to which stitch is rehung first. Stitches that cross over must be rehung last.
In this photo, the top row has just been knitted and the stitches from the previous row will now be reformed. In the cable design, a two stitch "vine" criscrosses over a one stitch "vine" up the work. You won't always be crossing twisted stitches. On the left side of the photo above, you can see a little bit of the center motif. The knit stitches appear to zigzag up the work. This is also a one by one cable but only one stitch is twisted. Simply twist one stitch and have it trade needles with a plain stitch.
It is extremely slow work. I've been working on and off this one section since Easter and have only done 68 rows. In between doing all that, I made two more sweaters on a different machine without doing manual patterning.
