Olympic Swatch

Designing color patterns is hard. Really hard.

At one point I had every stitch dictionary and knitting magazine I own spread across the dining room table (you all do this, right?). If I could only merge this stitch pattern with that color sequence and that there border, it'd be perfect.

The exercise was very helpful though.

In the end I used my Stitch & Motif Maker software to help make a stitch pattern of my own.

What a challenge! I had an idea of what I wanted to do, but it still took several hours to get the right one. If I had to use colored pencils it would have taken all day. I'd be ready to declare success when I realized the color change I made 20 minutes ago forced half of the rows to have 3 (and in one case 4) colors. Pretty but crazy! Back to the drawing board...

I finally got to one I thought I'd like. Two rows have 3 colors but I can manage that. I couldn't figure a way to preserve the pattern without it.

What do you think? My current idea is that this would be for the band around the sleeves, and for the upper body I'd use this and maybe another small border at the top and bottom.

Stranding the alpaca was as hard as I thought it would be. One of the first stranded knitting swatches I made (almost two years ago) looks better than the one I made this weekend. I'm excited for the challenge, but I'm also glad that it's not on the entire sweater.