Since the full chart from the previous post is, shall we say, a bit unwieldy to work from, I stripped it down to its bare essentials before I cast on the back at the tops of the shoulders. This chart preserves all the key information while fitting on a single piece of paper with the stitch symbols at 12 points, which is important for my aging eyeballs.

It shows both armhole edging patterns in full, minimizes the plain stockinette portions, and keeps only the outermost 4 stitches at both sides of the back necking edging, to make sure I start and end it correctly in pattern. Since it’s so narrow, I can format the page in portrait and put the printout on my magnetic chart keeper.

WIP It…Good?

It was all going swimmingly: the fabric density felt good, the edgings were mirror-image as I wanted them, and the knitting seemed to be going quickly, as I had the excitement of changing one of the two strands every six rows.

When I got to the final color combo, DE, before I would start the color cycle over again, I was able to better evaluate the full impact of the WIP.

Bother. It looked like clown barf. My careful considerations in ordering the colorways were, well, less than pleasing when worked up. The close-up on the stockinette portion, which is what will constitute the bulk of the fabric, shows just how horrible the combos were coming out.

I’m not sure I even want to try to figure out if different pairings would look better together, which would entail yet more swatching. So at this point, I have to do the only other possibility available to me for working with doubled yarn: both strands must be the same color.

A Second Decision

Since I’m going to hold each colorway double, do I even need to do short bands of each color? Or should I just cast on with the first color, work with it until it runs out, then do the same with the other four colors? That would simplify things tremendously and minimize the number of ends I need to deal with in the finishing.

Let’s count how many stitches there are to the underarms, to see if I could do the entire yoke of the vest in a single colorway. There are 20,735 from the shoulder CO to the last row before the UA CO, so no, I can’t work the entire yoke in one colorway.

All right.

Going back to my swatch, I worked 1500 sts with 17.90 g of yarn. That means I can make 84 sts with each gram of yarn held double. The lightest hanks were all 103 g each, so I can make at least 8,652 sts with each colorway.

Now I just need to group contiguous rows, starting from the shoulder CO and working toward the bottom edge, that contain a total of 8,600 sts, to leave myself a bit of a buffer. The easiest way to do so, since I’m working with a chart (rather than, say, a spreadsheet of row-by-row stitch counts) is to double-click in the left-most cell of stitch pattern of the bottom-most row, hold down the Shift key, and use the Right Arrow key to select the rest of the stitch-pattern columns in that table row. Then, still holding down the Shift key, I use the Up Arrow key to select another full-width stitch-pattern row, since my current selection already contains all the columns with stitch symbols. My word processor will update the “characters selected” number shown in its status bar as each new row is added to the selection. If I go too far, Shift–Down Arrow de-selects a row. (Note that I can’t simply select the entire table row, as the row numbers’ digits and colorway letters’ characters would be included in the character count.)

When I start with the shoulder CO and select rows one by one, I find there are 8,402 sts from the CO through row 41 and 8,613 through row 42. I don’t want to push my luck, so I’ll stop color 1 with row 41. Now I double-click in the left-most stitch-pattern column of row 42, Shift–Right Arrow to the right until all the stitch-pattern columns on that table row are selected, then Shift–Up Arrow while watching the character count. I hit 8,360 through row 79 and 8,590 through row 80. Once again, the extra row takes me a little too close to the limit for comfort, so I’ll stop color 2 with row 79. When I repeat this process all the way up the chart, I get the following row ranges, stitch counts, and row counts:

• CO–41: 8,402, 41
• 42 –79: 8,360, 38
• 80–113: 8,464, 34
• 114–144: 8,277, 31
• 145–173: 7,775, 29

These splits, as far as rows worked in each color goes, seem close enough, especially considering, again, that I have only the 5 hanks to work with. If I had a second hank of each color, I would probably make each colors’ total row count the same, which would also allow me to make the vest considerably longer. But I have only one of each color, so I’m going to have uneven row counts.

One Last Trick

Since my first attempt changed only one color at a time, the beginning of the right-side rows, where I was changing colors, was not particularly loose, since one strand was always continuous there while the other strand was broken.

That led me to ponder how I could have a neater edge when I was changing both colors at once. I realized a sort of cheating way to do so: instead of changing colors at the beginning of the row, I’ll work the edging in the old color, then change to the new color when I start the stockinette portion.

I don’t think it will show very much because of the texture in the edging, with the purl bumps sort of disguising which row they were actually worked on.

And that idea makes me wonder if I can’t just work each double-stranded color to the end of the yarn, then change colors no matter where I am on the row. After all, in the CotLin Circular Yoke, I didn’t switch my beginning of row from the center back to the left underarm “seam” like I normally do with circular seamless garments, with the BOR being where one normally does any color or pattern changes. I just looked at that sweater again, and it’s hard even for me to tell that the colorways change in the middle of the back. Of course, those colorways were much closer in actual color than these five colorways are.

Hmm. Maybe I’ll work each yarn as far as possible, but always stop either

• at one of the two side “seams” below the underarms or
• at the junction between the edging and the stockinette

to disguise where the colors actually change.

That will cover what I do with yarns C, D, and E, but for yarns A and B, which I’ll use while I’m still working the yoke’s fronts and back separately, I think I’ll have to change based on the row counts.

So, while I figured out the basic change points based on stitch counts, when I have needles and yarn in hand, I’ll work as far as possible, stopping at one of the places listed in the two bullet points above.

To keep the logistics as easy as possible, I’ll do something I know other knitters do routinely but that I’ve never done: work from both ends of the ball at the same time. When I’ve worked previous projects with double-stranded yarn, I’ve either had enough yarn that I could work with two full balls at once, or I’ve split a large hank into two equal-ish size balls based on weight, which usually leaves me with a couple dozen feet remaining on one ball when the other runs out.

Should I Change the Order?

Now that I’m working each color double-stranded, I need to look again at the order I’ll work the colors. I could revert back to a lightest-to-darkest, or darkest-to-lightest, order, giving me a fade. Or maybe I should consider the order based on the attributes I discussed in the previous post…

After pondering, my colorway order, from shoulder to bottom edge, is

• Goddess (dark purple)
• Ashland (medium purple)
• Turkish Delight (bright pink)
• Sweet Home (reddish purple)
• Berry Smoothie (grayish light purple with speckles)

Since I’m a Winter (based on Carole Jackson’s Color Me Beautiful), I don’t really want Sweet Home or Berry Smoothie to be closest to my face, so that was the overriding consideration.

And since Goddess and Sweet Home were about 2 g heavier than the other three, I should be able to work an extra row in the yoke compared to the row ranges listed above. I could even add in the 10-g co-op samples of all five colors, just to eke out a bit more overall length. Yep, that’s what I’ll do.

Time to frog and cast on again.