I have now finished the fourth colorway

and I did indeed stop the neckline Mistake-Stitch Rib pattern as soon as I worked the double dec that “joined” the outermost two columns of knit stitches. I am quite pleased with the final result.

My only complaint is that I set up both sides of the neck edging only partly symmetrically, not fully symmetrically, so there is a slight hitch in the final appearance. But no one (apart from all of you, to whom I have freely confessed!) will probably ever notice. I would also have liked to have finished the neckline while still in colorway 3 (the gray tonal), but that was simply not possible with the yarn quantities I had on hand (and making do with those quantities was part of the adventure).

Changing Colors

I had enough yarn left of colorway 4 to work one more body round but not an additional round on both sleeves. Shrug. So I finished colorway 4 on round 142 everywhere. That means that the first round of colorway 5 worked on the body will be the first with the body-shaping increases (I won’t start sleeve shaping until colorway 6). I’ll work those incs on either side of the 3 stitches centered at the body “side” seams, where I’ve also already dropped down each center st to hook back up my phony seams. I’ve also established phony seams on both partial sleeves as well.

Colorway 5

As I mentioned in the very first post for this sweater adventure, I’m combining the Knit Picks’ Hawthorne Fog Bank value pack’s full hanks with the 10-g samples from the complete Hawthorne co-op I participated in earlier this year. The next colorway, Goose Hollow, is the only one so far whose two dye lots seem quite different. The 10-g sample has a lot more pink in it than the full hank does, so for this colorway, I’m going to do the sleeves first using both ends of only the large hank. When I start the body, I’ll work with one strand of the main hank combined with one strand from the small sample. When the sample runs out, I’ll again use both ends of the main hank. That will isolate the excess pink in just one part of the sweater, which will give the FO a symmetric appearance (since there won’t be lots of pink only in one sleeve).

Based on the stitch counts in my chart and the yarn’s starting weight, I’ll work the sleeves through round 164 and the body until the yarn runs out. Colorway 6 is similar enough to colorway 5 that I could probably change at the center front relatively invisibly, though I may stop near one of the side “seams” depending on how much yarn would be left over. (Another goal in these adventures is to avoid having any scraps go into the closet, so I’m pushing to work all of each color.)

Back to the knitting! (Well, after lunch…)