Just as I did with the first sweater in this series, I’m going to make a multi-column table in my word processor and use my knitting font to show every stitch, including the cast-on and bound-off stitches, of the sweater.

It will be trickier here than with the first sweater, where the raglan lines split the sleeve, front, and back stitches logically. In this chart, the circular yoke is going to look really strange. In fact, I’ve never even tried to chart a circular yoke sweater before, so once again, I have an interesting chapter in my adventure.

But if I don’t want to play yarn chicken, and I most certainly don’t, I need to know how many stitches are in each vertical segment of the sweater so that I can plan where the color changes have to happen. Again, having already made a sweater in this yarn will be a huge help, because I know quite well how many stitches I can make with each gram of yarn. If I can remember to weigh each skein before I start working with it—sometimes difficult to do in my excitement—then I can monitor my yarn usage as I go to make sure I’m staying on track.

On the other hand, these colorways are much more similar to one another than the ones in the U-Neck, so I may not worry about exactly how many rounds I can get out of each. In fact, I may just work with however much yarn I have of each color, changing only when a particular colorway actually runs out.

However, I still need to know how many rounds each colorway will do before I bind off the sleeves, so I do still need to do some stitch counting to make sure the colors change at the same points on the sleeves and body.

I also may not fuss too much about where the colorways change, at least in the yoke. Once I split the sleeves and body, though, the BOR and color changes will be at the left “seams” on the body and the underarm “seam” on the sleeves.

The Fully-Charted Sweater

Since the sweater is worked seamlessly in the round, it’s hard to figure out how to show it on flat paper. Complicating matters are the short rows used for the back-neck shaping.

I did two things to simplify the chart.

• All the short-row shaping is shown within the table column containing the back’s stitches. Since there aren’t clear division points between the front, sleeves, and back on a circular yoke sweater, it’s easiest to put all the stitches involved in the short-row shaping in just one part of the chart. I put the short rows’ stitches in the back’s table column, because it’s the back neck that’s being shaped. There are blank areas in the sleeves’ and front’s table rows for those project rows, since all the involved stitches are shown elsewhere for convenience.
• I made sure the stitch counts for all four parts were correct at the underarm, then divided up the stitches between the end of the short rows and the underarm split as close as could be done based on the arithmetic of the increase rounds. The large blank areas between the four parts will of course not exist in the sweater itself, just as the blank areas between the raglan lines in the U-Neck’s chart did not exist in the actual sweater.

Counting Stitches

Once all the stitches, along with the cast-ons and bind-offs, are in the table, I can select table cells in various groupings and let my word processor count how many symbols are selected. I can get about 135 sts from each gram of this yarn, and each skein will weigh roughly 98 grams, giving me more than 13,230 sts from each skein.

Just to allow a margin of error, I’ll plan to change colors after every 12,500 sts (one round worked in both the body and sleeves’ ribbing needs 358 sts, so I’m reserving about 2 rounds’ worth of yarn). The entire sweater has some 56,731 stitches, so at an average of 11,350 sts needed per colorway, I will certainly not run out of yarn. The consideration now is, Can I change colorways at equally spaced intervals the way I did with the first sweater (where I worked 34 rounds with each of colorways 2 through 5)? Perhaps a corollary consideration I should figure out first is, Do I even want to do bands that are all the same height?

Attempt #1

My first attempt does the splitting this way, with the following ranges of round numbers, total rounds, and stitch counts:

• Colorway 1 (neck): 1–63, 63, 12647
• Colorway 2: 64–103, 40, 12420
• Colorway 3: 104–138, 35, 12254
• Colorway 4: 139–194, 56, 12468
• Colorway 5 (hips): 195–222, 28, 6518

I’m not particularly enamored by the large variation of band heights for colorways 2 through 5. But the number of rounds (64 through 222 inclusive) means I can’t simply divide those roughly 160 rounds by 4, since I don’t have enough of color 3 to work 40 rounds on both the body and sleeves.

Attempt #2

If I do 35 rounds of colors 2 through 4, that takes me from rounds 64 through 168, leaving rounds 169 through 222, a total of 54 rounds, for color 5.

I don’t like that option either.

Attempt #3: Lots of Shorter Bands?

Once I complete colorway 1, what if I divide up the remaining rounds in such a way that I do short bands of colorways 2 through 4, followed by a tall band of color 5, then finish up with short bands of colors 2 through 4 but in reverse order?

Since the fifth colorway is a dark solid, it would run near the vicinity of my almost non-existent waist, and with lighter colors above and below, I might look a little curvier than I naturally am.

Let’s see how this arrangement would work. Each colorway will have 40 rounds, but colorways 2 through 4 will be split into two 20-round groups, one group above colorway 5, the other below it in reverse order.

• Colorway 1 (neck): 1–62, 62, 12470
• Colorway 2: 63–82, 20, 5640
• Colorway 3: 83–102, 20, 6720
• Colorway 4: 103–122, 20, 6924
• Colorway 5: 123–162, 40, 10900
• Colorway 4: 163–182, 20, 4488
• Colorway 3: 183–202, 20, 4592
• Colorway 2 (hips): 203–222, 20, 4578

For colorways 2, 3, and 4, this split will require a total of 10,225, 11,332, and 11,412 sts, respectively. None of those totals comes close to my self-imposed stitch-count limit per skein.

We have a winner!!! Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding!!!!

However, now that I see how much margin I have on colorways 2 through 5, I will reduce the number of rounds worked in colorway 1, so that I can be sure to have my CO-tail ball big enough to complete the neck ribbing after I remove the PCO.

So I’m going to work color 1 for only the first 60 rows/rounds, then move those 2 rounds to the very last band.

I think this arrangement will also allow me to extend the body another 9 rounds, so let me add those stitches to the chart and re-do the counts. Be right back…

Ha! I didn’t realize that the chart already had those desired extra rounds, so I’m actually done!

Final Numbers

So the revised colorway-round assignments and stitch counts come out this way, with the chart having blank lines between each colorway:

• Colorway 1 (neck): 1–60, 60, 11906
• Colorway 2: 61–80, 20, 5640
• Colorway 3: 81–100, 20, 6600
• Colorway 4: 101–120, 20, 6908
• Colorway 5: 121–160, 40, 11156
• Colorway 4: 161–180, 20, 4480
• Colorway 3: 181–200, 20, 4584
• Colorway 2 (hips): 201–222, 22, 5038

The total stitch counts for colorways 2, 3, and 4 are now 10,678, 11,184, and 11,388, so I’m still well within a safety margin on those 3 colors as well as for colors 1 and 5.

YIPPEE!!!!!

All that’s left now is the knitting!