Blue mohair vest

My latest project for the current drive just came off the needles. It isn't blocked yet but I am too antsy to wait to post about it.
I like to knit vests for a4A when I am not certain to have the time to invest in a full sweater. With each vest, I have tried to teach myself something new, or to practice a technique learned in class or on my own. I had tried steeking before, on a rectangle shawl and on a blanket knitted in the round then cut. This time I steeked a v-neck. Talk about feeling empowered! I am just about ready to steek anything in sight right now.

The project started as a stash-busting vest. I had two skeins of a variegated, mostly light blue mohair; I combined them with two skeins of fingering-weight wool, one medium-blue, one a very light blue-ish green. I alternated these two shades every twelve rounds, which yielded the wide stripes on the vest. Double-stranding had two advantages: it "stretched" the yardage so that I could knit at a larger gauge and make a whole vest out of the mohair, and, more important, since mohair almost always contains a small percentage of acrylic, it enabled me to boost the wool content considerably to ensure warmth and stick to the a4A guidelines. A third bonus: the wool softened the mohair significantly.