Mods:

• No rolled collar, so only knit about 1.5 inches of initial neck ribbing.
• After joining back and bottom pieces, knit one round in stockinette and then knit the snowflake stitch pattern, starting after two stitches and ending before the last two stitches of each row, since pattern didn’t fit into the 74 stitched perfectly, so 4 stitches in center of bottom are not knit in snowflake.
• After finishing snowflake pattern, knit a couple of rounds of stockinette and then 1.5 inches of ribbing before casting off, so no back cover shaping.
• Knit with a looser tension to have stretch, since Phoebe is a bit on the larger side of a Bichon size range. The final measurements were closer to those for the size Large.

Notes:
I chose this project because I wanted to practice my stranded colorwork. I had done it once before with a pair of mitts but I had definitely done it very confusedly and with both strands in my right hand and there was lots of tangling. This time I read some articles first and so held the white in the left hand to be the dominant color and the pink in the right hand as background color, knitting left and right handed, respectively. What I didn’t realize until I was over halfway through was that I was actually looping the white strands over the needle the wrong way so was creating twisted strands, so that’s why the poor snowflakes look so funny. Once I started putting them the correct way, it started looking better, but I was not interested in redoing the whole color work section. Now I feel a bit more comfortable with colorwork and will look forward to trying something more adventurous!