What is the one piece of advice we all hear and even give—yet ourselves ignore—as we knit?

Check your gauge before you begin, and check it as you work, changing needle size as necessary.

Yeah. I only did the swatching part. I forgot to check as I went. My initial stitch gauge was good, but about an inch and a half in, it tightened up considerably. When I put all the stitches on ribbon to do a test fit, it seemed awfully narrow and short. Now, the narrowness will relax out a bit with the first laundering, and as for the shortness, well, I swatched and accounted for the number of rows/rounds I’d need to get from the back neck to the underarm. I decided I was just going to trust the numbers, almost in spite of the evidence that was before me in the mirror.

The Botton of the Front Neck

To go from working flat to the in the round, one works to the end of a RS row, then pulls the WIP around and works what was the first stitch of that row, now become the first stitch in the round. The same thing had to happen here, except that I had to cast on the stitches for the bottom of the front neck.

I have done a couple of projects that required casting on at the ends of rows (Optical Delusion and Dreambird, both of which are garter stitch and use short rows to achieve their effects), and I used the exact same technique here: crochet CO.

Once I finished the last row, row 65, I turned to the WS and put the hook through the final purl bump and over the knitting needle, with the working yarn under the knitting needle.

I then * grab the working yarn over the knitting needle and pull it through the loop on the hook. That’s the first of fourteen stitches CO. Then I put the working yarn back under the knitting needle, and repeat from * until I have one less than the desired number of stitches.

Now the final stitch comes from the loop on the hook. I draw the loop a bit larger, point the hook at the needle tip, and transfer the loop. Note that the working yarn has to be under the needle, just like it was for making all the other stitches.

The front neck CO completes the neck shaping

and all I need to do is turn back to the RS and begin working in the round–with the proper-size needle!

As I worked this first actual round (as opposed to the rows I’d worked so far), I formed the new stitches on the 3.00 mm circ, because of the information I’d found during swatching. Yes, I actually remembered to change needle sizes at the proper time!!!

Crochet CO Onto the Knitting Needle

A crochet CO is simply working a crochet chain but doing it over or onto a knitting needle. If I were doing a provisional crochet CO (and I would be soon, for the underarm cast-ons), then instead of using the working yarn, I would use waste yarn. The advantage of working directly onto the needle is that you don’t have to subsequently knit up from a regular crochet chain, which can be fiddly. It’s also prone to knitting up through an incorrect loop, which means the PCO won’t unzip without cutting the waste yarn at those points when it comes time to put the live stitches on the needles.

Changing to Color 2

Because I would knit up stitches around the neckline, I wanted to be sure that color 1 did not touch color 2 during that process. So I wound up doing an extra round of color 1, switching to color 2 on round 68 rather than round 67. I meant to do the color change at the left sleeve/back raglan line, but I didn’t pay proper attention and wound up switching at the left sleeve/FRONT raglan line. Sigh. It’s not a big deal, really, and changing colors at the angle formed by the raglan helps disguise the switch.

Oh. I forgot to weight color 2 before I started using it. I put the stitches on a ribbon, weighed the circ and an equivalent number of all the stitch markers currently pinned into the WIP and on the circ itself, then put the stitches back on the circ and weighed the whole thing. I knew how much of color 1 I had used, plus the weight of the circ and markers, so I could figure out how much of color 2 I had used and add that figure to what remained, which gave me a starting weight of about 96.7 g of color 2.

I finished the underarm EOR increases and the final round worked even after it. Now it was time for the next big step: splitting the sleeves and body.