Since I’m going to do a waste provisional cast-on and start immediately with the stockinette main fabric of the sweater, I want to leave a long-enough tail so that when I remove the PCO to work the neck ribbing, I have sufficient yarn right there, already attached and long enough to do the entire final trim.

Keeping Records Is a Good Idea

Before I knitted up stitches around the neckline of the U-Neck, I weighed the remains of colorway 1, which was 34.05 g. There, I knitted up 156, worked 3 rounds evenly, did the decrease round down to 128, did 3 more rounds evenly, then BO. That’s the equivalent of 4 rounds of 156 plus 5 rounds of 128, a total of 1264 sts. When I finished the neck ribbing, I had 24.90 g left, so that sweater’s ribbing used 9.15 g of yarn. That piece of information is about to come in quite handy.

On this sweater, I’ll start the neck ribbing with 140, work 3 rounds evenly, decrease to 112, work 3 rounds evenly, then BO. That means I’ll do 140 times 3, plus 112 times 5, a total of 980 sts. Just to avoid any, er, surprises, I’ll allot 9 g of the first colorway of this sweater for the neck ribbing, winding off that much as my “tail.”

“Measure Twice, Cut Once”

However, because I’m trying out so many things all at once at the beginning of this sweater, I’m actually going to swatch these techniques with a colorway of the yarn that won’t be included in the FO. I’ll sacrifice the Polar Blue solid colorway to test out my plans, working to probably the second increase round, then removing the PCO and working the neck ribbing.

I’d like some warm fuzzies before I get started with the project colorways. If the technique swatch comes out screwy, well, then it’s back to the drawing board for designing sweater number 2!