In which I create middle-earthy swatches

The swatching has commenced!
I absolutely adore these fiddly little cable swatches. I started the red one, on right, last week before my box from Knit Picks arrived with the lilac Andean Treasure yarn I'll actually be using for the sweater. I wanted to refresh my cabling skills (skillz?).

The Knit Picks box arrived in Friday's mail...just in time for my sister, who had lugged her Lagoon yarn all the way from Spokane, to have left two hours earlier. So it'll be swatching on separate sides of the Cascades.

I've never knit with alpaca before. What a change from the springy Cascade 220 I used for the red swatch; what a change to be cabling on size 3 needles! (I used 7s and then 8s for the 220, hence the strange parallelogram shape of the swatch.) The alpaca is silken, heathered, and hairy, like a box full of Tribbles. Because it's less--I don't know the right word; maybe defined?--I was worried about the cable's stitch definition at first, but now that I've knit a couple of repeats I like the way the alpaca halo blurs the edges while keeping the pattern intact. (It also, conveniently, hides any wonky-ish stitches.)

I am in awe of the genius of Kate Gilbert, who designed this reversible cable panel for "A Cardigan for Arwen" in the winter 2006 Interweave Knits. Wow. The color in this last photo is really horrendous (the yarn is a lovely deep red, almost garnet red, not the garish stoplight orange it appears here), but it shows the depth and intricacy of the pattern:
I think I'm about ready to cast on for the sweater! New skills commencing...