WIP Wednesday: I meant to have this sweater done a month ago

Granted, in order to have this sweater done a month ago I would have had to start it a month ago. Instead I was working through more (hopefully) lucrative ventures and knitting up samples in yarns I've dyed. So I suppose that's worth doing. Then there were those yarn swap things...

Though, TBH, even if I had started this in time, I'm still not sure it would be done. It's only recently that I've come into some knitting time.

Enough of that! On to the talking about knitting.

This week's (and last week's and probably next week's and maybe even the week after that's) WIP is a summer sweater, "Louise" by Amy Christoffers from the Berocco Fiora book. All of this came to me as a door prize from Minnesota Knitters' Guild Yarnover. I have nine skeins of this yarn and a book full of patterns and the fibre content is 40% cotton, 30% viscose, 15% alpaca, 10% nylon, and 5% wool in a DK weight, so I thought this would make a good sweater for air-conditioned classrooms. (It turns out, however, that these classrooms are not so much air-conditioned as set to "freezer" and "Siberia", so I'm pretty sure I could roll in in a full wool/alpaca worsted weight sweater and be perfectly comfortable even though it is July.) Regardless, I think I'll still get some wear out of this sweater in the early fall and, of course, next summer. And if I happen to get this done before August 7 (I'm on track for now, but you never know these days) then I'll have it for summer classes, too.

Here's where I am for now:

The back is done, the pocket lining is done, and the left front is started. I've had more time recently, but I'm also going weirdly polygamous in my knitting (thanks to podcast KALs) so...we'll see.

Thoughts on this yarn: It's nice. It's soft because of all the fibre contents, but sturdy. It's a tiny bit splitty, but not that bad. Although I've never found cotton to be particularly hard on my hands, this one definitely isn't. I didn't get gauge for the sweater on the needle size suggested (well, I got row gauge but not stitch gauge...which like...it's written for this yarn, so IDK what that's about), so I went down a size (so now my row gauge is wrong AND my stitch gauge is still wrong) and then I just did the math that allows me to knit the size XS wide to get the size S I need and I just have to keep track of my row gauge. It's working out.

About this pattern: I get that it's in a pattern book for the yarn and there's limited space, but holy wow is this hard to follow. There's one chart. It's 15 stitches by 42 rows. For the whole sweater. Which is fine, because as you see above the pattern repeats, but the chart makes you read R-L on RS rows and L-R on WS rows which I know some people find confusing. Worse than that, the sweater is shaped with increases and decreases which mean you have to re-think the chart and how it all lines up on your own. Then, now that I've moved to the front...you don't have the right number of stitches. The chart has 2 stitches border on the RS, then a repeat of 8, then 5 border stitches on WS. This works for the back, but on the front I had to cast on 44 stitches and turn 5 of them into a button band, which left me with 39 stitches...which isn't a multiple of 8 if you take off the 2 stitches on RS or the 5 stitches on the WS, so I guess it's now 44-5 button band stitches and then including the 7 border stitches to get 32, but the pattern is VERY NOT CLEAR about that and I wish it would be.

Also, I read the part about how to attach the pocket lining and I'm super confused. So, we'll see about that when I get there.

I'm smart and can logic this out, but it's somewhat annoying and means I *really* have to think about knitting this, which is not always what I want to do.