Changing Lanes

I changed projects dramatically yesterday.  I started Hun.

This is going to go one of two ways.  It is going to be a very fast knit or it is going to get set aside and will take forever. 

I am veering from the pattern in one significant way.  I am knitting it top down using Need a Circular Yoke  from Cabin Fever.  I cannot tell a lie.  I struggled.  It took me almost an hour to sort out just how the book worked.   It's a very different kettle of fish than the Ann Budd book, but then, I have worked with more than one of her books before and this is the first time I worked from a Cabin Fever book.

I got lost in transitions and pattern bands and pattern bands and transitions and I kept wanting it just to tell me how often to increase.  I started to wish I had a real book in hand (I have a digital version) where I could turn the pages, indeed where I could see the whole page at once, and toss it on the corner if needed.  I was starting to worry that it wasn't going to work how I wanted it to work, as a free wheeling design tool, seeing how it seemed to rely on specific stitch designs and patterns in transition bands and pattern bands.

But that just didn't make sense.  Its knitting.  Its wool.  A stitch is still a stitch.  The increases were not part of any of the patterning and I understood what she meant by pattern bands and that the increases were all in the basic knitting transition bands and yet the language kept leading me away. I took a while but I did sort out that the transitions and the patterns are really only suggestions, and figured out what would be critical to me and the sweater I was planning to make.  It would have been much easier had I been knitting just a plain sweater using the book first and I have to admit, I do like the direction she is going with this. In fact, in a lot of ways, now that I know what to look for, I think I prefer the extremely simple construction process laid out here.

Anyway, once I got started knitting and knitting confidently,  it was  hard to put down.

I only stopped because there is one more round and I'm will be at the first of the colourwork patterns.  I wanted to be fresh for that.  

It was after 11 till I put it down and that is saying something.  I never stay up that late.  I think this sweater is going to be a wild ride and a lot of fun.