Kathryn essay 4: Do the knitting thing!

And now…the icing on the cake, the knitting! 

I cast on at the neck, and following my chosen stripe pattern, I made my increases at all the places I'd mapped out, and I tried on my tee as I went along to ensure that it was fitting as planned, and before I knew it, I was waiting (not so) patiently for my new tee to come out of the dryer.

There are a few small, but important, things to consider when managing the different yarns:

1. Do you want to try for a jogless jog? This would depend on how skinny your stripes are. For me, the process of doing so was never easy, satisfying, or pretty with Sparrow in skinny stripes, so I just let there be a jog, end of story.

2. Do you want to carry the yarns up the piece as you go? Again, this depends on the size of stripe you are using. With Kathryn, I could carry the yarns up the work, leaving fewer ends to weave in, because of the thin stripes. Working with wider stripes, or with more than three colors, however, it may look better to cut the yarn at each color change and weave in the ends. I made a striped v-neck raglan for one of my sisters a year or so back, using seven colors, and boy, I tell you…weaving in all those ends was a weekend-long project, but boy did those stripes look amazing! See the swatch for that one here.

3. Other things to consider: Do you want the yoke to finish up at the end of a stripe or is it OK if it's in the middle? And do you want the sleeves and body to end at the same place in that striping pattern? That’s a completely personal choice. Mine ended on a certain stripe, and I had my body and sleeves end after a complete stripe in the same color that I began with in the yoke. If you have wide stripes, ending the yoke in the middle of a stripe might look really nice. Just keep track of where you are in the striping at the separation round, so when you go to work the sleeves, there's no confusion.

And…if you have been reading this series and are still not convinced you want to do all the work of coming up with your own very special set of numbers, check it out!! We've sized the thing for you.