I just love Rachel Illsley’s patterns! Chose a fall color palette from leftover yarn I had alongside the sublimely soft Royal Bee deep, dark green. (When I tried the browns, neither had enough value contrast, so I dropped the brown. I also didn’t have enough yellow gold.) I did decide to make things extra complicated. For many of my rows, I used 3 colors; a few had 4. I tried 2 iterations of color planning. I frogged about 10 rows in the middle of the pattern; I like my new color play much better now.

I didn’t make gauge. After row 17, I only had 7 inches, so I kept on knitting to row 21 before splitting. All of the fit issues are my fault not the excellent pattern. It’s a bit tighter across the chest than I’d prefer, but I’m not willing to frog back the whole sweater.

I had trouble pattern matching when I picked up sleeve stitches. I also needed to pick up extra stitches to keep the sleeve from binding. I settled on the pattern’s 18 stitches plus an additional 18 to make an even number for the pattern. With my additions, the underarm stitches don’t match their body stitch counterparts (which is a bit disappointing), but I preferred to have the pattern flow correctly around the sleeve. My single color knitting looseness resulted in a bulge after the charted part which annoyed me (see picture), so I reduced 1 stitch after each pattern repeat to 85. Then, 14 rows after pattern stitches, I began decreasing ssk before/ k2tog after BOR marker- center of underarm- every 6 rows. I reduced just 1 stitch to make an even 62 sts at 16” before switching to ribbing.

All of the problems are mine and have nothing to do with the excellent pattern.