A friend said my helix sweaters would be better if the stripes were vertical. Anyone who knits helix knows it works because it’s knit in a spiral. The bottom of the sweater in vertical stripes can’t be a helix. Doing the entire bottom of a sweater in intarsia is just not gonna happen. Doing the amount in Better Banner was plenty! Admittedly, it’s one of the prettiest, most elegant sweaters I’ve knit so far but still . . . not happening.
I thought I’d try knitting up a piece with horizontal stripes, turning it 90° and kitchenering it on. Eh, worth a try . . . but no.
The base of the vneck came out particularly lovely which always pleases me and the striped bit was interesting to knit but I wouldn’t want to do a ton of it. Picking up edge stitches wasn’t an issue but the color bars that show up where the picked up stitches are doesn’t please me at all. Ugh. To fix it I’d have to do intarsia in the base color before picking up edge stitches. Doable but the second and less obvious problem is the dimension of the stitches. On this particular knit using a US4, the SPI is 6.8333, the RPI is 9.
In joining the horizontal to the vertical means the vertical stands out proud instead of laying flat and smooth due to the mismatch in row/stitch gauge.
There are two solutions to this problem. I either need to use a smaller yarn/smaller needle to get row gauge on the bottom to match stitch gauge on the top or I need to use a smaller needle (2 sizes at least) with the existing yarn to get the current yarn’s adjusted row gauge to match the upper’s stitch gauge.
I am not going to knit BP on a US2. Not happening. I’m also not going to reknit the already perfectly lovely top. Yeah, that’s not gonna happen. Time for a rethink.
I have LOTS of short lengths of Rainbow Bamboo from frogging the two test collars for Better Banner. I have LOTS of short length of Bamboo Pop from all sorts of projects. I could do short horizontal stripes of one or two stitch intarsia stripes. I like this plan a lot. I still get my vertical stripes, I get to use up a lot of short lengths of yarn and it would be pretty without being a repeat of better banner. I could also do vertical intarsia stripes of different widths including some with variegated yarn. I could do a vertical repeat of Relationships matching a color in the variegated to the bordering colors. I have options! I never know quite what I’m going to do until I dive in.