Ahhh! This swatch has me ridiculously excited! Like. Big time. I’m not the world’s biggest fan of swatching. I’ll be the first to admit it. In my experience a swatch can lie and a beautiful swatch does not guarantee you’ll make all the right choices for your knit and everything will turn out hunky dory. Swatches are not magic but they are helpful tools.
Here I’ve knit a cowl that is actually a swatch for a sweater. A clever trick! Well, it’s clever until I admit that it was actually supposed to be a hat swatch but then the motifs ended up being too tall for a hat so it pivoted into a cowl. I used scrap yarns from my scrap yarn wall, so that’s always a nice feeling, even if that means the cowl features two different whites in a way that I find pretty noticeable but that I’m sure nobody else will detect, right?
So, here is a pretty solid step 1 to turning my Iggy Peck Architect sweater dreams into reality. I charted the motif and after knitting it I made a few tweaks and now I have a pretty good idea how to approach the sweater construction. With this pattern the struggle for me is all in the yoke. My biggest difficulty when it comes to writing sweater patterns is with the grading - ideas are easy, it’s making them work across all sizes that is hard. And in this case the pattern needs to line up perfectly with the raglan decreases (at this point I’m thinking a bottom up construction will work best for this design). I’ve charted it very carefully in such a way that the yoke decreases will align perfectly with the motif, there won’t be any weird cut-off motifs, it should all flow seamlessly if I’ve played my cards right. Step 1 was swatching and making sure that I’m committed to my motifs before I put in all the work to grade it. And here we are! I love the way this looks and now I can attack the yoke pattern writing with gusto! Wish me luck!