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Rogue

Pattern: Rogue

Yarn: Tahki Donegal Tweed

Needles: #8 circular and straights

I’m using Tahki’s Donegal Tweed in a fantastic green color. It has beatutiful green and purple tweed flecks in it, and shows the cables amazingly well. It’s also remarkably soft. I can’t wait to start knitting in this—I think that I’ll probably start the sleeves first, doing two at a time. This swatch was just from the free cables part of Jenna’s website. It gave me some good practice on chart reading and on making weird decreases.

is really hard sometimes. Here is a rundown of my attempts:
1) Cast on for one sleeve, work several rows in twisted stockinette on size 6s for the hem. Realize that your cast on is way to tight and will never match up enough to get sewn in.
2) Decide to do a provisional cast on, and while I’m at it, decide to do both sleeves at once on a circular needle. Attempt to relearn provisional cast on, but foul it up. (the thing about provisional casting on, from what I can tell, is that you don’t cast on one stitch at a time. Everytime you do a motion, you get really two stitches, so it’s hard to count them!)
3) Retry provisional cast on. First sleeve: check! Second sleeve: too few stitches (meh?)
4) Redo second sleeve. Correct!
5) Do one row of knitting, set work aside. (it was late!)
6) Pick up knitting during lunch the next day, p tbl one sleeve, get halfway through the second and find a funny-lookin stitch. Recount stitches for second sleeve. One too few!!!! boo.
7) At home that night, redo provisional cast on for second sleeve. It doesn’t work right.
8) Get frustrated, frog both sleeves (all three rows of them).
9) Read through the Rogue Along archives, decide that if I can force myself to cast on loosely, the provisional cast on will be unneccesary.
10) Cast on both sleeves very loosely in the normal way. Success! The casted on stitches are definitely loose enough to sew in to the back when the sleeves are done. Looser, even, then my provisional stitches were.

After my two day long cast on, I am know several rows into the twisted stockinette hem. So far, so good.

Oh, and before I forget: I did of course make a gauge swatch, but with an oatmeal color that the lys had in stock. Making that swatch convinced me that I could get gauge with this yarn, and it also helped me get an idea of how the fabric would drape. I fell totally in love with this yarn (it somehow gets softer as you knit it) and ordered enough of this perfect green for the sweater. That oatmeal colored skein will probably become a hat or something, but the swatch gauge just isn’t photo-worthy enough to put on the site.