Even though I've been knitting madly for the past few days, I'm not sure any of it will be with us for long, if you know what I mean. I lengthened the belled lace cuff, then tried an eyelet rib to transition into the upper sleeve, then tried making the upper sleeve fuller, and then gave up and went back to my earlier version. I was wondering how the raglan decreases would look with the lace.
And here we are. Not bad, was my first thought. My second thought: The two sides are not symmetrical. Now, this is not a vertically symmetrical pattern, so of course I knew this would be the case, and it didn't really bother me, at least where the left and right sides of the front were concerned, for instance. And this pattern does have strong diagonal movement to it, so I thought raglan--diagonal--okay; better than a wavy set-in shoulder seam, anyway. But somehow, picturing the left sleeve looking very different from the right sleeve at the raglan seams--this bothers me.
Possible solutions: I could make one sleeve a mirror image of the other sleeve. I could do this and make the body stockinette, achieving an odd-couple pairing of baseball jersey and 
lace which might be edgy and cool--or disastrous. I could use the lace pattern as an accent panel only...which is why I created this swatch.
I started with simple wide stockinette ribs, then tried the "waterfall" pattern from BW's 1st Treasury along the sides. Notice how the Chinese Lace bullies the adjacent stitches into undulating along with it? So then I tried increasing and decreasing on either side so the resulting combination has straight edges, allowing other stitch patterns to be combined with it more easily. But am I fighting the very qualities of the lace which attracted me in the first place? Am I trying to make a square egg?
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