I took swatching a little more seriously with this sweater, knitting a faux in the round swatch like Ysolda mentions in her book. I didn't take it so seriously that I knit a full 4 inches in length, but I think I got the idea.
The point with this swatch is to mimc knitting in the round by using only knit stitches on your stockinette. Since I knit tighter when using circulars, I thought this would be wise. I knit a row, then slid the work down the circular needle to the right side again. I brought the yarn from the left side to the right, leaving plenty of slack, to knit the next row. I just repeated the process over and over.
You can see the slack yarn strands aren't pretty, but they served their purpose. I got gauge with size 8 needles. Did you see that? Size 8... that's practically ginormous. I think I can almost certainly say that I'll finish this sweater before the end of the Summer Sweater KAL, if not the end of the week!
So I tried again, picking up more stitches, and now have this:
Ripping out Reverie yarn was not fun, but I'm so glad I did it.
By the way, Emma Welford did a Style Your Knits post about her Just Beachy pattern on the Holla Knits blog recently and I got to put together a polyvore outfit for her. Check it out here. (I love that other people still love Docs as much as I do.) Just Beachy is on sale through August 18th. Grab it because it's a really quick knit and very fun to wear.
I love the color of the new sweater. Really looking forward to the finished object.
ReplyDeletePicking up stitches is an important thing. Before it scared me and I read plenty about it. I feel a bit uncomfortable when the pattern mentions the amount of stitches you have to pick up, since I find easier to pick 3 out of 4, 2 out of 3 or every two stitches. I should write a post about one day...
Thanks, Elena. You're right, picking up stitches and seaming seams have to be two of the biggest reasons knitters shy away from patterns.
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