
Yesterday, the “official” start of the KAL, I casted on and started knitting the Inishturk sweater. To get gauge, I would have had to use size 11 needles. That left me with stitches that are way too loose for my taste. I decided to keep the size 8 needles. In order to make a sweater that is close to the 40 inch finished chest size, I have to actually knit according to the 52 inch pattern!
Alas, I made a mistake right at the beginning… one that I shouldn’t have made, having done this so many times before, but still did. I don’t like tight ribbing around the bottom of sweaters. The look of the ribbing is nice, of course and it serves to keep the bottom straight and where it belongs, but I don’t like the “sweatshirt look”. Normally after the ribbing, a pattern will call for an increase before the pattern starts. Normally, to keep the bottom straighter, I will actually cast on the full number of stitches required for the pattern and rib the same amount of stitches, with the main size needle (in this case, 8). Normally. Yesterday, I forgot to do that. I had finished the ribbing before I realized my mistake. *sigh*
I had to make a decision… do I rip it out and start over with what *I* consider the right amount of stitches or do I go ahead and leave it and make this one with a slightly tighter bottom? ? ? ?
I can’t bear the thought of starting over. I can’t bear to put so many hours and stitches into something that will nag and gnaw at me for the entire life of the sweater, because to my mind, it is “wrong”. The latter was the worse thought. There was nothing to do but to rip it out and start again. That made me so mad, I put it down and just left it alone.
Today I will cast on 144 stitches and will start again. I feel “behind”, but I am hoping that I will be able to eek out a little extra time for knitting today to get caught up.

To make this as easy to follow as possible, here are a couple of things I’ll do or I’ve done
1) USE MARKERS
I will place markers along the way. I love to use markers. The visual/tactile cues are very helpful to me. I will place them them after the first stitch (selvedge stitch) and then after the next 16 (16 stitches between 2 markers), then after 3, 6, 3, 16, 4, 6, 2, 2, 28**, 2, 2, 6, 3, 16, 3, 6, 3, 16 (right before the very last stitch.) There will be a total of 20 markers (I think! yes, I’m pretty sure.)
** I realized I had a typo here…
there are 28 stitches in the center braid,
not 24 as I originally typed.
I knew that and was knitting that.
Not sure what is up with my typing fingers!
I also start and finish each ribbing row with 1 knit stitch, so it looks like this:
k1, *k2, p2* (repeat until 1 stitch remains) k1
When I do the front of the sweater, I will do the opposite:
k1, *p2, k2* (repeat until one stitch remains) k1
This way, once I seam the selvedge stitches together, the pattern is intact.
2) TYPE OUT THE PATTERN
When typing out the pattern, I only include the numbers I need for the size I’m knitting. So I replace “2 (4, 6, 8, 10)” with just “8″
I put the pattern (just the back of the sweater so far) in a 2 column word processing document and repeated it 16 8 times. (a full repeat is 16, but the back is k the p’s and p the k’s, so I did NOT type that out. Also: update: I wanted larger type so I re-did my pattern with one row per page and put it in a binder. Much nicer for my tired, old eyes!) Then I went through and replaced the “Small Cable”, “Cable C”, “Panel A”, etc. with the actual instructions for that pattern, keeping track of which row goes where. I went through and did all of one stitch all at once to make sure I stayed on track, went back and did the next and so on. Then I printed the pages, cut them in half, punched a whole (and used reinforcements) and put the whole thing on a ring.


To my fellow Inishturk knitters:
How is your sweater coming along? If you have a blog, I’d love to see pictures of your progress. Leave a comment and be sure to include the link!
Off to cast on. Again.