Digression

I had been plugging along on Decimal for almost two weeks and making a goodly amount of progress when I suddenly grew bored and restless. I needed to start another project!! I've written before about my knitting ADD. I need to have more than one project going at a time so I can switch back and forth. Usually it's a big project and one or two small projects but this time I had an itch to start something complicated, with color work.

In November, at Stitches East, I bought two large balls of Kauni EM (scarlet, crimson and red-violet) thinking they would make a nice sweater for DH. I knew I would need to combine a second color but I didn't want to do the standard rainbow effect--couldn't see how that would work in a man's sweater. On my first visit to the Lion Brand Studio in NYC I saw just the thing. A large cone of charcoal gray, very fine wool. I grabbed it.

I'm doing my own modification of both the Kauni design pattern and the sweater pattern. The classic Kauni rainbow pattern has stripes and small squares. The color changes in Kauni are very long making it possible to use two skeins, started at opposite ends of the rainbow, and achieve a moving color pattern. I'm using one mostly red skein juxtaposed against the solid charcoal.

The original pattern is done in the round, all in one piece (a very large tube) and then, horrors!, cut or steeked to make openings for the sleeves and the button front. I'm just not ready to cut my knitting so I've widened the stripes and plan to approach this as a standard man's sweater with dropped sleeves. I'll knit in a tube until I get to the arm holes, divide the front and back and knit them separately until I get to the neck. I'll join the shoulders, pick up stitches and knit the sleeves.

Here's a photo of my progress so far:


In the next section, the squares will be red and the background will be gray. This pattern will alternate up the sweater--red with gray squares followed by gray with red squares. I think it's going to be quite handsome.