Since the Halcyon yarn isn’t available here, I’m doing a version of this jumper in Zara. After experimenting with some different colour combinations, I’ve settled on the one shown here. (The gold has been replaced with a coral, and the lime with an acid yellow.) To make up for the difference in gauge, I’m using a slightly bigger needle than usual (I’m fairly tight with my fairisle anyway) and knitting the biggest size. So far, so good!

Later: Okay, I’ve had to make a few changes. My row gauge was coming out a big tighter than the pattern, and seeing as how I’m a tall girl, I decided to go ahead and do an extra repeat on the body before starting the gussets. I think the new length will be good. The gussets gave me a bit of grief, though, and a message to the designer went unanswered. Mostly I was just annoyed that I had to join in the “golden” colour (pink in my case) a row early just for, like, three stitches in the point of the gusset, then break the yarn, then knit across the front before doing it again on the opposite side. I prefer to minimise the number of ends I have to weave in. None of my alternatives looked good though, so eventually I sucked it up and knitted it as written. It’ll annoy me again when I get to the finishing. (I haven’t been knitting them in as I go simply because I was worried I might have to frog the whole thing if the ply substitution didn’t work.)

And now I’m on to the sleeves. I switched to 4mm needles (as the pattern suggested) to better match the tension of the fairisle portion. About halfway up the arms, though, I realized they were coming out way too tight. I’ve frogged them back and I’m doing my increases earlier so they’ll go over my arms with a bit more ease.

Later Still: Okay, I’ve finally cast the sucker off. I redid the yoke several times. First I followed the pattern, doing my decreases (after the fairisle finished) every other row. This meant that the neckline didn’t decrease very quickly, so I ended up with a very floppy and unattractive boat neck. So I frogged it back and tried doing two decreases for every plain row. This closed the neckline quicker, but it still grew too high too quickly. Then I hit upon the idea of doing a modified saddle shoulder, similar to what I did on the Snook’s seamless hybrid. I worked back on forth just on each shoulder for 10 rows, doing the decrease (and therefore eating up one of the front or back stitches) at the end of every row. That seemed to work! I’ve cast it off for now and I’m trying to decide if I like the fit. All the ends are woven in except for the collar. What do you think?

Finally finished. I decided to leave the neck for now, as I had to turn it in for the Easter Show. I may still redo it later. Cross fingers I win a prize!