Saw Truth and Beauty, a gorgeous exhibit of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, and was inspired to choose rich, saturated colors. Used knitting graph paper to plot out design.

Cast on 234 on circular US3’s using provisional crochet cast on. Tried following the pattern to do the corrugated ribbing with two colors, but mine looked really sloppy because the purled purple Tosh Merino Light was thicker and had more thick/thin textural changes than the red Yarn Love. Tried straight main color ribbing and it looked too loose on US3s. Followed TECHknitting’s support for the corrugated ribbing and tried again. This time I put the main color (red) as the purl part of corrugated ribbing. Whoops! An inch and a half in I realized I made a Mobius strip. Uggh! 4th time somehow I had an additional 100 sts 5th time was the charm. I did the corrugated with the yarns over my left hand thumb and forefinger like a longtail cast on. Since I was clumsier with my thumb, I put the purple over my thumb and knit with purple purled with red. This made the purple knit stitches dominant while the red purls receded- much better.

The Yarn Love was scrumptious to knit with! I especially love the subtle sparkle.

After knitting to underarm, put the 8 sts on each side on hold and provisionally cast on 72 per arm. That gave me 364 to work my chart. That was 26 repeats of the 14 atitch peeries pattern and 4 repeats of my larger 91 sitch bird heart flower chart. Knit the peeries in aubergine and gold for center row on chili background.

Switched to Himiko second row after peeries. I tried to knit intarsia for the bottom few rows of the ribbons, but it was a hot mess. Decided to rip back and duplicate knit the little bottom strings. Once I got to row 6 of the large chart, I shifted back to stranded knitting. I got pretty far in with 364 sts and tried it on- much too large! Ripped back to beginning of Himiko and decreased 40 sts to 324. Retooled my chart to include a smaller flower that only took 6 sts. Repeated 81 st chart 4 times with the heart centered over the centered peeries. Still, too big, so went back to simple and just did the flowers mirror image 75 sts (4x). When I got near the top of the chart, decreased to 156 sts. Decided not to do the top peeries. I tried the short rows on 3’s and the sts were loose. Switched to US1’s for the short rows. Then switched back to 3’s for the 1” corrugated rib. First time doing icord bind off- great instructions and gorgeous polished edge. I’ll do that again!

For sleeves picked up 83 stitches on US3 (2 on each side of the added stitches). On first round decreased 2 stitches by k2tog and ssk the new stitches. 8 rounds down decreased 2 more, so the added stitches disappeared and there were 79 sleeve stitches. Reduced to 70. About 10 1/2 inches from underarm, began reducing 2 stitches (ssk/k2tog) every 6 rows. Reduced to 54 st and then knit 5 more rows and realized I needed 56, so added 2 sts before peeries; 1” of corrugated rib and icord bind off. At the risk of unequal sizes, second sleeve I only reduced to 56 and knit the last 12 rows to peeries. Used this tutorial for casting on the 3 stitches.

Duplicate stitched the little ribbon hangs in the yoke.