Variegated Yarn

After I used up my red/yellow/orange variegated yarn (leftover from an afghan) to make the Flashy Cardigan to wear to Stitches, I was pleased at how well the raglan sweater draft fit.  During a recent  sale at the fabric store, some more variegated yarn was purchased, mainly because there was aqua in the colorway.  I could visualize a cardigan over an aqua tank worn with my tan trousers.  The color repeat is larger in this new yarn, so I was interested to see how the color sections would pool or stripe. The Flashy Cardigan yarn had very short color sections.  Who knows, maybe these fun yarns will come back into fashion!  I doubt it, but who cares?

The Flashy Cardigan

The only thing I wanted to change on my raglan pattern was the top of the sleeve.  There's supposed to be about an inch of stitches left that become part of the neckline, but because the gauge is only 4+ stitches/inch, the seam allowances used up about half of that, so I wanted to add a few more stitches.  Here's how my patterns look when I'm ready to use them:

 All the numbers with circles around them are row count numbers to tell me when to make increases or decreases.  This is one feature of a knitting machine that is great, but you can get the same effect with hand knitting by putting a safety pin every 20 rows or so.  That way you can get the row count in a few seconds instead of having to count every row, every time.

The ribbings are knitted ahead of time by hand and are hung on the machine instead of a cast-on.  This gives a more hand-knit look to the garment, and besides, I get to use the cast on that my grandmother taught me.  This picture shows the sleeve ribs waiting in their bowl.

 

 

 

So far I've finished the back and front:

Look at the funny pooling on the upper back!  You can never tell ahead of time what will develop.  As usual, I am wondering if there is enough yarn, since I only have one and a half skeins left, but time will tell.  It's not as if a dye lot difference will be noticeable.