Moving along.

I cast on for my green sweater, and knit about an inch or so and realized that this monstrosity would be big around the Hubbo, and he's no delicate little creature.   So, guess what?  I frogged.  Good thing I didn't knit up more or I would have been cursing.

Back to the drawing board.  Originally I thought of this as a bottom-up sweater, with my usual picking up the sleeves and working down.

Original notes.

My swatch, bottom up.

 Well, the entire concept got tossed.  I wasn't happy with it at all.  So, I changed gears and decided to do this sweater from the top down.  I haven't done something like this in maybe 20 years, but it's not hard to figure out, and I'm just finishing up a top down dress for Miss P's dolls.  The problem was fitting in the pattern.  In stockinette, I had a gauge of approx 5.75 sts/inch.  One multiple of the pattern was approx 1.75".   How to get this to fit into a sweater with a circumference of 38" was the problem.

Graph paper to the rescue.  I literally plotted it out, and came up with a great pattern.  I could center the pattern on the back and use a small border of k1, p1 rib on the armhole edge.  On the front, I could do a wider border on the edges, and not have to pick up and knit anything.  But how does the pattern look upside down?

OK, I'm happy with it.  I cast on the right amount of stitches using an invisible cast on, so that I can pick up the stitches and work down on the fronts.  I like Barbara Walker's invisible cast on, so that's what I used.  It's easy and fast and the crochet cast on just never works for me.

To be continued....

Wall-to-wall books - It is a lot of work, but I like doing it.  I like the challenge.  Heaven forbid I should ever do anything the easy way.