The Lord of the Rings Sweater      This sweater uses the "Oceans of Fun" pattern from Kids Knits (www.kidsknits.com) which includes child and adult sizing in sm, med and large. You can use my Rune Charts with any basic sweater pattern, but I particularly like the "dwarvish" effect of the hooded jacket from "Oceans of Fun". First off, instead of fishes, I used a border design which looked something like this... The body of the sweater is forest green, the border background is mossy grey, the letters are a reddish brown, and the repeating pattern at the bottom is that same reddish brown alternating with white. Other colour combinations could work just as well. I’m planning on knitting a brown version of this sweater soon. The brown and white alternating trim extends all the way up the front and around the hood just like the trim in the "Oceans of Fun" pattern. Instead of the zipper recommended in the original pattern, I chose to attach toggles down the left side of the sweater. On the right side, as I was casting off, I used finger chaining to make loops for the toggles. By "finger chaining" I mean that I’d use the working yarn to pass one loop through the previous one until I had a chain of loops about eight loops long. Then, placing the loop on my left hand needle, I would pick up a stitch about two stitches back from where I had originally started the chain, and continue casting off. It was important to twist the loops back like this, or my cast off on the right hand side would end up too loose. I expect if you know crochet there’s probably an easier way to do this, but I was quite pleased with the way my own method turned out. :-) The charts below are from Appendix E at the end of The Lord of the Rings, Part Three, The Return of the King. To compose your own message using the runes you can either translate them yourself using the key in the book, or you can download any of a number of Elvish fonts available on-line and simply type in what you want. I can’t honestly remember whose font I downloaded onto our computer, but here’s one that looks nice. (My charts are based on the Angerthas.) http://www.acondia.com/cirth_fonts/morecirth.htm Have fun!