So excited to knit this beautiful pattern! I fell in love with Yamafiberarts’ color choices, so I dug into my stash to see if I could approximate her colors. My local yarn store, Royal Bee Yarn, had a beautiful Red Tailed Hawk base yarn by Baby Cat Yarns, and then I spied the iridescent Chrysocolla Julie Asselin mohair/silk/Lurex. I couldn’t resist!

Most of my rows used 3 colors. I took liberties and used fingering to sport weight remnants (doubling the mohair yarn). Instead of provisional cast on, I used longtail to cast on 114 on 2.5’s. Knit 1 1/2” ribbing. After chart A, yoke was already 7”. I had 320 stitches and wanted 330, so I added 10 evenly. Sleeve split at 8” 49-59-114-59-49 added 13 stitches under each arm (total body 240).

For the top flowers I knit 3 rows in the coral, then 5 rows in the darker red/orange and back to 3 coral. For the dragonflies, I knit one row in the green leaf color, 3 in the white with green flecks, 4 in the light pink variegated, 4 in the dark pink variegated, back to 4 in light pink, 3 in white flecked, 1 in leaf green. In rows below and above the dragonflies’ heads I left out the mohair yarn because was in danger of running out.

After sleeve split, knit motifs 1 and 2 rotationally. I didn’t figure out that’s not what most people did until row 17. Doh! I kind of like the whimsical effect, but it made the color work much more complicated. First and last 3 rows of flowers- dark pink, middle rows- light pink (except very middle- just the green). I created a scarab beetle chart to better bring back the sparkly aqua from the dragonflies. Switched to US2’s for ribbing on bottom and sleeves.

For sleeves, picked up extra stitches (85 total) and reduced to 80 to get 4 pattern repeats. Whoops! For the lower intermediate rows, I only did one plain row on either side of the dashes rows. After I repeated all patterns in the body, I reduced every other chart (4 stitches in row 1 between leaves, 2 more in row 3- total reduction: 12) created a small 14 stitch chart with ladybugs. Knit 6 rows after dashes. I had 68 stitches. Reduced to 56 before beginning ribbing on US2’s.

Once I knew I had enough yarn, I added the line down the back of the beetles with one strand of mohair (duplicate stitch).