Since the beginning of the Aran sweater, knitters have improvised their own arrangement of motifs to fill a sweater body.  For this avant-garde design, I abstracted a giant cable to appear an organic part of the sweater’s form by crossing at the V of the neck.  To avoid the bulk of a standard cable, I used a mock cable technique, filling in the cable and half of the back with one of my favorite Aran textures, Irish Moss.  It’s named for the algae (carrageenan) plentiful on Ireland’s coasts, which is used as a natural "filler" in everything from toothpaste to ice cream (and here, an Aran cable).  -- description from Loop-d-Loop, pg. 81 (pattern on page 112)