Friday, November 21, 2008

My current complicated project somewhat explained.

It's the Late Friday Edition of All Things Shea!

I'm still knitting, but the pics don't look that much different than I showed you last time. Dividing my time between the two sweaters is not helping progress.

The waffle stitch vest is just tedious, but the Zara Cabled Pullover is something else.

It's quite complicated. I'm doing the cables without a cable needle which is indeed faster, but the pattern can be a little daunting. It's extremely easy to get lost if you don't have a good method of marking it. For those of you planning on making it, perhaps my method of doing this will help you.

I would encourage anyone making this to make good use of a pencil. Let me give an example of how I'm doing it. I'll explain it first and then show you a diagram after. Due to copyright stuff, I'll only show you a part of the pattern, enough to make my point.

I started with the sleeve portion (I dread starting the second on, by the way) to make sure my gauge was right without investing too much time in the project (yeah, right).

There are several places where I am having to place tick marks currently.

1. Small cable
  • The pattern is only four rows long. So I place a tick mark as I finish each row. However, I group the tick marks in fours so I can just glance down at the sheet to know which one to do next.
  • The tick marks are done in this section not to know which row I'm on specifically, but to know which part of the stitch pattern to do next.
The diagram here combines the small cable and large cable stitches. I've drawn a line between them. You can see how the small cables are grouped in fours and the large grouped by fives.

2. Large cable - I group these by fives to make counting where I am (which row #)in the pattern easier. ( See above.)

Separate marks are placed by each group below on the pattern.
Like so:
  • Sleeve row a (where a denotes rows 1-58)
  • Sleeve row b (where b denotes rows 59 - 85)
  • Sleeve row c (where c denotes 86-108)
  • Sleeve row d (where d denotes 109-137)
3. Sleeves - general
  • I place a tick mark for each row number that I'm on in general, also grouped by fives:
And guess what? I get to start all over when moving to the next sleeve and then again every time I move to another section of the sweater.

I told you it was complicated. But if you don't mark the pattern somehow? Oh Boy.

I hope this helps someone else with this pattern. Just know that there is always madness in my methods! :)