All that’s left now is using my swatch gauges and body measurements to determine my stitch and row counts. My washed swatch worked flat on 3.00 mm needles had 24.5 stitches and 32 rows per 4 inches.

The armhole edging will be 7 sts wide, which was right at 1 inch in my washed edging swatch, and the front bands will be 11 sts wide, for 1.5 in. The corresponding row heights for the horizontal underarm edging will be 10 rows and for the back neck 12 rows.

• Back Yoke Width (outer edge of armhole to outer edge of armhole): 18 in, including 7 sts = 1 in of armhole edging on each side, so 16 in of stockinette = 98 sts, for a total of 112 sts to cast on at shoulder, working top-down
• Back Neck: need a mult of 4 + 2 for the Mistake-Stitch Rib, so 54 sts
• Shoulder Width: 112 – (7 x 2) – 54 = 44, divided by 2 = 22 sts of stockinette between armhole edging and neck edging
• Back Width at UA: 20 in = 122 sts
• Front Width after completing V-neck: 10 in, not including 11 sts of front band, so 61 sts of stockinette and 72 sts total
• Underarm CO: about 5 or 6 sts each side, on both front and back (so 10 or 12 at each UA), with an adjustment to keep edging continuous as vertical joins horizontal
• Back Neck Edging Depth: 12 rows
• Underarm Edging Depth: 10 rows
• Yoke Depth (from shoulder to UA CO): 12 in = 96 rows
• Bottom Edging Depth: 14 rows

Changing Colorways

Since I’m holding two strands of yarn together in this sweater adventure, I need to decide how to handle the colorways. There are two basic ways of dealing with the five colors I have:

• always hold two strands of the same colorway
• always hold one strand of each of two different colorways

Given my disappointment in how the colorways were dyed in my first two sweater adventures, I’m going with the second option on this third sweater, hoping that the combos will subdue any issues of the way any particular colorway was dyed. I can do a nearly endless array of pairings. If I think of the colorways as colors A, B, C, D, and E, then here are two specific set-ups and one, er, not so specific:

• AB, BC, CD, DE, EA, and repeat
• AB, AC, AD, AE, BC, BD, BE, BA, CD, CE, CA, CB, DE, DA, DB, DC, EA, EB, EC, ED, and repeat
• any random combination of two colors

I can also change the pairs after a random number of rows, rather than doing the changes according to fixed row counts as I did in the first two sweater adventures.

And should I make the front and back yokes match, that is, the parts of the fronts and back above the underarms? Since I’ll work front–back–front below the underarms in a single, full-width block, they’ll always match. But while I have to work the yoke parts of the back and two fronts separately, do the fronts need to match each other, and do either or both need to match the back?

In other words, how random am I willing to be? Given my disappointment with the dyeing styles on the two CotLin sweaters, probably not very random. That means I’ll need to figure out all my colorway pairings ahead of time so that I can make sure I don’t run out of any colorway prematurely.

And if you’ve read the posts for the first two sweater adventures, you know that I’ll use a chart to do my stitch counting and plan my color changes!