Arwen Progress

My top down sweater continues apace. Once I reached the bottom of the armpit, and following the directions in Custom Knits, I went back to the top to pick up stitches. This was a slow process of carefully unravelling the provisional cast on and adding each loop to the needle. On each side I picked up seventeen stitches, leaving the middle stitches on waste yarn. Later I'll pick those ones up for the neckline.

The dark brown yarn is the provisional cast on. I like using this cast on more and more, since it allows me to go back and change things if I don't really like the way the sweater turns out. Honestly that's part of my whole love of yarn--you can't really mess it up, since you can always go back and rip out and change things around.

Once the yarn was on the needle and I got going in the right direction, the next step was to increase for the neckline. And once all those stitches were on, I started the cable charts. These defied logic for me for a little while. Essentially, at this stage in the game, I'm knitting upside down. In a usual knit row, for example, the yarn hangs at the right edge as the row begins. With this project, it hangs at the left edge. This made the cable charts a little confusing initially, so I decided to do them backwards. Instead of starting a right side row at the right end of the chart, I'm starting it at the left end, because this is where the yarn starts. Maybe this is the wrong way to do it--maybe I'm overthinking it--but I guess I'll see as the cable repeats unfold and show me how they look.

Soon I'll join it all together at the armpits and it'll be one round sweater instead of a large misshapen piece whose ends I tinker with.