I updated my garment chart with the body increases so that I could count how many stitches I would need to make with each colorway, just for some assurance that I wouldn’t be playing yarn chicken with any of them. I also updated the sleeves to show the two stitches I’d need to increase to accommodate the 2×2 ribbing on the cuffs. I used blank table rows between each group of colorway rows to make it easy to select the table cells containing the stitch symbols for each colorway.

Since I used the Left- and Right-Justified text settings to make each column’s stitch symbols move to the correct spot, then the entire table contains nothing but actual stitch symbols. When I select cells, my word processor tells me how many characters are selected, which gives me the exact stitch counts. (If I used space characters to move the actual stitch symbols to the left or right, then those characters would be included in the character count.)

I also changed the bottoms of the body and sleeves to show the 2×2 ribbing I planned, and I even put “C” and “B” symbols in to represent the cast-on and bound-off stitches everywhere.

I now knew exactly how many stitches I would make with each colorway.

• Color 1: 9269
• Color 2: 10306
• Color 3: 12381
• Color 4: 10806
• Color 5: 9198

Knowing these stitch counts showed me that I would indeed avoid yarn chicken.