Knitting Bert’s sweater to compliment the Ernie sweater I just finished. I will be using the peanut pattern for the V neck but I’m going to use the yarn/ needles/gage I used with Ernie’s flax light pattern - Knit picks palette and size 5 needles.

I did a couple swatches and I like 1/2 thick stripe which works out to be about 3 stitches per color. Because of this, I chose fair isle over intarsia. If the stripes were 5+stitches wide, I’d have considered intarsia.
I was intending to cast on 132 stitches but because I was using three colors in a 3 stitch repeat, my cast on stitches needed to be a multiple of 9 and 3 so I cast on 135 stitches.

For me, doing this means I need to knit in both continental and English. As an English knitter, I was worried about introducing a yarn to my left hand. Turns out it’s ok. I had some tensioning issues at the cast-on edge but have been much more careful about that so it’s improved significantly.

31OCT2023

Well this was a doozie and I knit it in about 10 days. I think i am going to try and re-do this knit at some point because I learned a lot and can improve the color work.

I found very little online describing how to knit vertical stripes.
If you copy this pattern, here are some tips. Also leaving this for future me when I come back to this project.

I wasn’t convinced fair isle was the right choice until I blocked this sweater. It really relaxed the fabric and I now think it was the right choice. The bulkiness wasn’t as much of an issue as I imagined after blocking.

You have to be very careful with tension and your floats all need to be uniform or you’ll get 3D columns from the fabric puckering. For instance this was a 3 color repeat with 3 stitches per color. If my float for color A was too tight then it squishes colors B and C together even if the stitches for colors B and C are ok.

Due to the extra bulk and lack of give with all the floats, I recommend sizing up. You can knit a swatch… but this was not clear to me from a swatch.

Knit a swatch and practice decreases in pattern. I don’t love the way the V-neck came out. I think if I strayed from the pattern I could have figured out how to decrease the number of stitches per row while also having the colors terminate at the neckline in a more visual pleasing way.