I didn't work on any of my three sweaters this weekend.  But I did (pretty much) figure out the the mint sweater's stitch pattern.  I just couldn't get it out of my mind after starting that super long swatch.  I woke up Saturday morning with a couple of ideas about how to do it.

I've almost used a whole skein of yarn swatching!  But I've satisfied my curiosity for now so I can get back to my sweaters.

Here's how my weekend unfolded ...

First I found a pattern with a woven diamond trellis.  I used that as the basis to do my first swatch.  I omitted all the lacy bits you see here.

I wanted to get familiar with the parts of a diamond grid.

Next I charted my own stitch pattern to make a 2-stitch cable.  On the second go-around, I did the little trick I was hoping would work for the inner hole, and it worked!

As you can see in my chart, I decrease and then yarn over twice in the middle of the diamond.  Four rows above, I drop all the stitches in the box and "knit, purl" into all of the dropped stitches to pull them up.  Note that I'm decreasing and yarning over on the same "purl" row.

At this point I felt like I'd nailed it.  But it wasn't exactly-exactly like the mint sweater because it had an even number of stitches in the hole, so I kept going.

Plus, the 2-stitch cable makes a pretty dense fabric, so I wasn't too thrilled about the idea of making a sweater out of it ... so I kept swatching.

I drew a stitch pattern with a 1-stitch cable and a smaller square.  I could cross my cables over a stitch in the middle, that way my hole could be one-stitch wide.  Here I'm still decreasing and yarning over on the same purl row.

I liked it, but I felt like the non-cable stitches were blending in with my cables, so the last row of diamonds, I purled all the non-cable stitches (chart below).

Honestly, I didn't see much difference with the purling.

With everything I'd learned so far, I decided to try a 2-stitch cable.  Changes are:

-- my 2-stitch cable crosses over a stitch in the middle

-- the stitch that gets crossed-over is SIMULTANEOUSLY decreased into the middle-most of the back cable's stitches

-- there is no yarn over on the decrease row - the yarn over is on the next row (which is a purl row)

- I used a bigger needle to see if the fabric was less dense.

I drew the chart first.  My chart was messy and crazy, not the clean one above. :)  In fact, all of the charts in this post are drawn just for you.

This part of the swatch is a hot mess, but I think it gets 90% of the way to duplicating the mint sweater stitch.  Woo hoo!  

On the bottom left I forgot to drop the hole stitches ... see the yarn over hole?  That would have been the bottom of the drop stitch hole.

Top left diamond is where I experimented by doing a decrease and yarn over on the same row (#3).  That doesn't work at all because there's too many strands in the hole.

I used standard notation on the knitting charts, so if you google knit symbols, you should be able to find what the heck I mean.  But I've been pretty light on the nitty gritty details, so feel free to ask questions if you have them.