I love the pattern - would make an excellent first dip into garment-sized colourwork: only minimal shaping (short rows in the stockinette shoulder part) - a beginner could concentrate fully on the simple colourwork.

Effortlessly customizable: Reducing or adding width is easily accomplished with a 4-stich repeat

Deceptively simple and presents so many possibilities! And I am not talking solely of colour combos here.

I also appreciate the patterns adaptability as well as flexibility. You can really PLAY with the concept!
So many ideas!

Here´s what I did (aka mods):

As for adaptability:

• I added a CC4 (turquoise) in the hem repeat, alternating it with the rusty orange as I a) liked that the look of the turqouise from another colour scheme and b) it helped break up the the presence of the orange which was a bit too dominant for my liking.

• Shoulders: Instead of going back to MC (grey) for the shoulders, I used the rusty orange instead - gave a nice accent.

• Edging on armholes as wells as neck & front: Here I also added a dip of coulour and used CC4 (turquoise) for the armholes and CC2 (dark blue speckled from body repeat) for neck and sides - again instead of going back to MC (grey) - did a row of stockinette after pick up of stitches before adding I-cord -looks much neater.

• Instead of an I-cord bind-off for neck & front band, I opted for a couple of rows in garter stitch. I would have really liked the I-cord but the side edges have a tendency to roll in (even after blocking) and an I-cord wasn´t going to help with that. The garter band does counter it much better but not to my full satisfaction - will add a band of bias tape on the WS. Makes also for a neater look!

• Omitted side pockets, cute detail, but I have no use for them. (Beauty of the design though is, that they sit in the sideseam and can be added anytime later - a cloth pocket (flannel or the like) might be an option for the sewing minded.

• Seamed shoulders. Played with the idea of a visible seam there for a while but discarded that later on, hence no 3-needle bindoff there.

As for flexibility:

• In order to get close to stitch gauge I had to go down to size 3 mm needles (US 2,5) (also liked the fabric better) this meant that my row gauge was off. Easily compensated by adding a 4th hem repeat as well as an 8th body repeat.

• I left out the one row of CC1 (the lighter tone from the hem) and did that in the CC2 (dark blue speckled) Why? Well, the dark blue speckled turned out to have more orangy, and more importantly, lighter portions than anticipated - so the really light CC3 would have done nothing there, also the CC2 had already so much going on colour-wise, it would have added to the optical restlessness.

• Reduced CO stitches for back from size XS (170) to 134. Reason for that: I have extremely small shoulders and a very slim torso - the width size XS achieved was too much for me, and as the ruana has no closures it would have had a tendency to fall of my shoulders. Aaccordingly I had to reduce CO stitch count for the front panels to 62 . -This meant adapting the number of w&t in the shoulder sections: I did the w&t after 8 stitches and only 6 in total. Added 4 rows of stockinette after the colourwork section to accomodate for length in the shoulder part.

Length: I followed pattern specs.

And remember: light blocking is your friend!

Helpful video for 2-stranded colourwork:

2 methods for 2-stranded colourwork
Turquoise yarn held double (fingering!)

If I were to knit this again, I would NOT use a 50% cotton (yeah rest of it is nice cashmere but still) yarn as MC - but go for a woolen yarn. The cotton content really gives it dome weight. But that´s what was in stash…