slopes and hacks...

Let’s talk about the pockets. They are made first, and the top of the pocket is attached to the Front as you’re knitting it, so this is a committed deal. You can’t just take them off like a patch pocket and readjust. Made one, following the stripe sequence for the Back, same as I’ll use on the Fronts, using the shortrowed decrease hack https://knitwords.blogspot.com/2018/02/decreasing-hack.html
(which I LOVE!) for the slope of the pocket and did the cast-off in tan because it made the most sense – there was tan at the bottom and top of the slope, so I naturally had the tan in work at the point of the cast off. I wasn’t crazy about the tan going across the navy because I had in my mind that navy should be the main colour but then navy would be interrupting the tan…yada, yada, yada. It’s probably time to go back to the original 3-stitch outlined decrease.
Look at me, making all these swatches ;)!!

23 and me...

shortrowing underarm

Not really, it just worked out that way! For the body, I wanted about 5 cm/ 4-inch stripes with navy at the bottom and at the top of the garment. The overall length is 56 cm/ 240 rows, give or take one or two. The only thing to worry about matching is the side seam between back and front, easy enough if you start the same on each piece and make the stripes equal. I have this thing in my head that at the shoulder, to have the 5 cm stripe of navy with the shoulder seam half way, so ending each piece with half a stripe of navy. I juggled around the numbers and think I can achieve that with 23 row stripes, starting with navy a little less, like 4 rows less because I will add the border trim in navy to make up the difference. Did I say I wasn’t using the yarn changer for this?

manually knit loose row in current colour

chained off loose row, nice curve!

No reason to, mostly because of the odd number of rows in the stripe, and, to run the second colour up the side of the stripe to avoid having to darn in a whole bunch of extra ends wherever possible without compromising the edge where it might show.
To keep on track for the 23 row stripes, I made a little cheat list of the row numbers to change colours. At the underarm, still wanted to use shortrowing for the decreases – it makes a much neater curve to seam to, so what I did was knit so far in the navy. (oh yeah, I didn’t carry the tan up and into the curve – too much trouble and what’s two more ends at that point?) Finished the navy stripe and carrying it up the edge, completed the underarm decreases, still shortrowing and then cast off the whole bunch of held stitches with tan and continued!

I’m liking this! Made the Back so I could look at the wide stripes and put the narrow stripe of the sleeve up to it to decide what to use for the front pouch pockets – I didn’t really think I’d want them narrow, but I was open to the possibility. Held it all up in front of the mirror and confirmed! did not want to alter the pocket stripes! :)