geometric cowichan-styled vest

It's done! And I love it! Huge sigh of relief....because there was a lot of trepidation going into this year's Fringe and Friends Knitalong. Although I love the pattern that Karen had chosen for many reasons, I am basically a lazy knitter at heart. The thought of tackling a stranded project knitted flat while trapping every other float and written in the Japanese style in one size using super bulky yarn....well, it kind of left me dizzy. But every once in a while, you need a project that has the potential to kick your butt, so to speak. Knitting on the edge and all that.

I went into this project with an unusual-for-me amount of planning and preparation. Here are some of the mods that I found made the process more enjoyable to knit and the finished vest more wearable:

* I down-sized the pattern to fit my petite frame by shooting for a gauge of 3 sts per inch versus the 2.5 sts per inch called for in the pattern. My row gauge was also smaller in order to make the length shorter (13.5 sts per 4 inches vs. 12.5 sts). Also knitted the bottom ribbing a little shorter.

* I knitted the body in one piece to the underarms, which kept the amount of yarn ends to a minimum and made for less fussy finishing.

* Although I knitted all of the armhole edgings, collar and front bands at the same time as the body as called for in the pattern, I took advantage of my Addi clicks & switched out the size 13 needles (used for knitting the body) for size 11 needles (used for the edgings, collar and bands) as I went along. This worked like a charm to neaten everything up.

* Believe it or not, the easiest and most enjoyable part of this project was learning how to trap floats on right & wrong sides using just my right hand. Pretty proud of this:

fun-proofing

The 2015 Fringe and Friends Knitalong is currently underway and the theme for this year is Cowichan-inspired knits. The chosen pattern is the Geometric Cowichan-styled Vest from the Japanese yarn and pattern company Pierrot. It looks to be a fun but daunting knit for many reasons, so a little pre-project planning was called for in order to make the process more enjoyable. Here's what I came up with so far:

=> Since the pattern is written in the Japanese-style, with the instructions mainly consisting of a page of schematics & several charts which outline the pattern stitch by stitch, a way to keep track of the charts is a must. Dusting off the magnetic chart-keeper that I had bought years ago and never used plus some highlighter tape.

=> The vest is knitted at a super-bulky gauge so I am using three strands of a worsted weight yarn held together. I decided to ball up the yarn ahead of time instead of pulling from three skeins while knitting. Boy, has this made a huge difference! Now the project is more portable and there are less skeins to manage at once (and less tangles).

=> Also trying my hand at catching floats every other stitch. This wouldn't be too much of a problem if the project was knitted in the round instead of flat. But since I am not very familiar with how to do this on the purl rows, I ended up making a cheat sheet of instructions after viewing these helpful series of videos by Andrea Rangel on Instagram. I had to adapt the instructions from two-handed stranded knitting to how I knit colorwork (both yarns carried in the right-hand).

Do you fun-proof your more complicated projects too? What kinds of things do you do? Oh, almost forgot the most important tip: take lots of tea/chocolate breaks :)