Week 4 Progress Report, Sweater 2

A little backwards progress this week. It had become obvious that the flashing and pooling was a real issue. Like most knitting issues, if I had accepted reality a little earlier, it would have been a quicker fix. There are several ways to deal with flashing and pooling, and the best way here was to back up to the start of the new skein and alternate two skeins.

All of the skeins are the same dye lot. For reasons that remain mysterious, the first skein did not pool. I tried a randomized sample of the other skeins, and they all pooled. So alternating skeins was the answer.

I'm not sure it's completely clear in these close ups, but in the first picture above, the original fabric, when viewed from a distance, created large blue blobs all over the sweater. Breaking up that pooling with the other skein gave me the more randomized result in the second picture, which is much more what I was going for.

And I bet you anything I will have to continue doing this up the sleeves and on either side of the front. Because while the other way to deal with pooling is to change the number of stitches, I don't believe for a moment that the number of stitches I drop down to will stripe in a nice, randomized manner.