This thing is so darn CUTE! Of course I wanted to make it in magenta and orange, but the recipient is a tween who only wears black or black and white, so I stuck with the original…and I love it! (Especially in the snow. Which I also love.)

update: She LOVES it!!

I want to emphasize how well-written and well-charted this pattern is! Kudos to Elspeth Vance and to Pom Pom. The beginning, which involves flipping between five charts while knitting colorwork flat but doing some of it in reverse stockinette, is not for the faint of heart. It’s a bit of a gymnastic endeavor to keep all the carries on the WS where they belong. But that part is only 14 rows. The rest of it is fine, and you hardly need the charts at all once you understand how the motif works.

I decided to go ahead and start the neckband before I got to the sleeve separation (I needed it to start looking like something). After 8 rounds of corrugated rib, the neck seemed quite wide, so I went down a needle size to try and draw it in a bit. After knitting the 8 rounds of stockinette for the edge, I realized it was still much too wide, so I ripped back and knitted those rounds again on needles two sizes smaller. It still flared a lot, though, so I tried folding it over and sewing it down. That helped, but it still wanted to flare and maybe even be ruffly, but I decided to leave it for the time being.

Neckband update: I ripped it back to Round 7 of the corrugated rib, then with US 7 needles, decreased by 19 stitches by working k2tog on every other white stripe. I worked 11 rounds total of corrugated rib, then one round Color B. On the next round of Color B, I decreased 10 stitches evenly spaced, worked two more rounds, then decreased 8 sts evenly spaced on the following round. A total of 37 sts decreased. Worked one more round, then bound off. The neck looks a bit tight in the photo, but in person it’s just right. The original neck looks nice in the photo, but in real life it flared so much that all you could see was the inside.

Although I worked my floats incredibly loosely, I still had a lot of puckering before blocking. I think the purling is partly to blame, but more than that is the columns of stacked motifs. Anytime you line up motifs in columns like this, you get pronounced puckering. It drove me kind of bananas. Happily, it mostly blocked out. I could probably get it perfectly smooth, but I tumbled it dry (it’s superwash) because I want it to be easy-care for the recipient’s mom, and it looks fab! The texture that remains really fits with the motif. The effect is most pronounced on the sleeves, which you can see in the photo with the raised arm. I quite like it. It doesn’t look puckered, though; it looks deliberate.

Note that the right and left shoulder charts are both split across two pages (in case, like me, you find yourself knitting the very first row and wondering where in the world the rest of the stitches are).

Note also that the back neck chart is backwards (flipped horizontally), but the motif is mirrored so it makes no difference. It’s just the numbers are at the wrong ends.

Note that the underarm rows on the body following the sleeve split don’t look the same as in the sample. You actually work 6 or 7 rows of corrugated rib in the underarm section, which includes the underarm cast-on stitches and the two adjacent raglan “seam” sections. After that, you maintain 5 stitches in the corrugated rib at the center of the underarm (centered around where the side seam would be), and incorporate 10 sts into the pattern in front and 10 sts into the pattern in back. And holy moses, I can hardly believe it, but it actually works out! It’s symmetrical on either side!

Note That the body of my sweater is noticeably longer than the sample. It’s a surprise gauge issue. I am getting perfect stitch gauge, and because the gauge is given over stranded knitting, which is usually square, I didn’t even look at row gauge. Turns out that the given gauge is not square, but my stranded knitting is, so my piece is significantly longer over the same number of rows. Sigh. I’m wondering if I could have shortened the motifs by making the six-row-tall section the centerline instead of progressing to the seven. That would take 26 rows out of the body, but it would also restore the motifs to circles, instead of the ovals they are now. Can’t say that I’m keen on ripping back to before the sleeve split. Maybe I’ll just shorten the lower motif. I used Photoshop to cut-n-paste my photo to shorten the motifs as described above. I like how it looks. It’s the last photo on this project page. Turns out the recipient prefers it to be longer, so I’m leaving it as is! Also, drying it in the dryer (it’s superwash!) tightened it right up.

Binding off: The pattern calls for a tubular bind off, but the stitches are black so you can’t really tell what’s going on, so why bother? I did bother on the sleeve cuffs (but really a stretchy standard bind off would have been fine!), but I worked a stretchy bind off on collar and hem. Not fully stretchy; I just threw in a YO every few stitches to give it some stretch.

Needles: Body on US 10. Sleeves on US 9. Collar on US 7, then US 6. Cuffs and hem on US 7.

Held the black yarn in my left hand to make it the dominant color.