So. In addition to being free, Shalom also has a nicer pattern on the yoke. I found that purling tbl is not as bad as its reputation, and it really makes the pattern so much more elegant.
I changed a number of things. First, I knitted long sleeves. If it is cold enough to wear something this bulky, chances are my arms will be cold, too. I used some mystery Icelandic wool, which I believe is 100 m per 100 g, knitting on a 6 mm needle. Did not try to get gauge, just made up some numbers on the way. The pattern only has one (small) size, so I made it larger by adding a 4th pattern repeat to the yoke:
After the 3rd repeat, I had 159 pattern sts (plus 10 edge sts). I increased 46 sts more or less evenly over the pattern part, for a total of 215 sts. I arrived at this number by looking at the previous increase. 159 is 130% of 123 sts, so the next number should be 130% of 159 = 205 sts, plus 10 edge sts = 215 sts. Don't know if this logic fits with general rules of yoke shape, Zimmermann percentage system, and so on, but it seems to have worked well.
So I knitted the 4th repeat, and then the next problem was how to split the stitches for body and sleeves. McFarlane splits the stitches to make bit fluffy sleeve caps on purpose, but my situation was different as I wanted sleeves. So I just put the yoke on an measured on myself. This resulted in 46 sts for each sleeve, 59 for the back, and 32 for each front.
The sleeves are only very slightly tapered, decreasing 4 sts on the first 20 rows. I increased a few stitches in each side on the last 10 cm of the body, to give a bit of illusion of a waist (I have none).
That's that. Love how it turned out:
