The Begining of Bob

I was so excited to start the front of my Bob Dobbs sweater. I had so many ideas about how I can challenge my little knitter mind and skill set by tinkering with the perfect techniques to make the perfect sweater. I was convinced that nothing could stop this knitter from producing a masterpiece with ease and finesse. Let's see how that worked out, shall we?

1. Intarsia/Fair Isle
I had this charming notion of how I could just join two colors for the center intarsia panel and work them in fair isle across the face. How could that go wrong? What's that you say? The face would become a double-thick, completely inflexable mass front and center of a potentially negative ease sweater (I'll go into the potential negative ease at a later date)? No way! I'm glad I thought of that before I started!

2. Inarsia/Duplicate stitch


See that? That's my duplicate stitch. In my infinite wisdom, I decided to knit the sweater using yarn I already had and just adjusted my needle size to get gauge. That results in a really nice, soft, drapey fabric that just happens to be a thousand times looser than it should be in order to keep the stitches from showing through from beneath the duplicate stitch. I deserve a big "You Suck" sticker for that one.

3. Straight up, no F-ing around Intarsia
I've resigned myself to working the chart using a new strand for each block of color. I'm okay with this. I really like intarsia. My first ever knitting project was intarsia. How hard can it be? This is the chart.



Do you see all of those tiny-ass blocks of color? Oh you do? Me too. I think I'm going to have to do some stranding and some duplicate stitch to keep me from going insane, but only in dire circumstances. Here goes.



How about one more for the road?