At the beginning of December I decided to start a couple of sweaters.  Out of the blue, I suddenly HAD to cast on for both of them.  One is slumbering now, but I'm still in the thick of the other, so I'm going to start blogging about it - Panoply of Purple Stripes using Stefanie Japel's knitting pattern Shapely Boyfriend.

What drew me to this pattern is:

• Top down!!!  So you can try it on as you go.
• V-Neck.  I'm usually warm, so having a v-neck helps me maintain a "just warm enough" temperature in the winter.
• Free.  So I could take a look at the pattern instructions and make sure I could handle it before starting.

Looking in my stash, I noticed the three purples I got in my yarn extravaganza Knit Picks order and thought I'd combine two of my favorite clothing design elements: purple and stripes.

When I mentioned I was making a striped sweater from three different purples to a co-worker, he said, "Do you think you can pull it off?" Ha! Of course I can!  Although without seeing the three purples, I'm sure what someone would imagine is nutso.  I think the mix I have is perfectly balanced.

The next step was to figure out what stripe pattern to use.  I used Open Office Calc to test out stripe patterns because it had bunches of colors to pick from (as opposed to my ancient Excel which had 12 or something).  

I looked at the knitting pattern and figured out how many rows were going to be in the back of the sweater.  I made the OpenOffice file that many lines tall so I could get an idea of how each stripe pattern would actually look.

Here are the stripe patterns I made in order.

1. Totally random.

2. Totally ordered.

3. Each color blends into the next.

4. Same as before with less overlapping.

5. Thick dark stripes interspersed with thin medium and light stripes.

6. Kaleidoscopic pattern.

7. Now that I see this one, it looks like I made a copy/paste error in the rows because I pattern I *expect* to see here is not the one I see.

8. Orderly and neat.

9. Thick light stripes interspersed with thin medium and dark stripes.

10. Expanded version of above.

11. Medium stripes with alternating sets of light and dark stripes.

12. Light stripes with alternating sets of medium and dark stripes.

13. Dark stripes with alternating sets of light and medium stripes.

14. Overlapping sets of 3 stripes.

At this point I was feeling a little seasick from staring at stripes.  I looked back through my sets and picked some of my favorites: 3, 4, 6, 8, 11, and 14.  I asked Andrew what he liked and after hearing what he thought, ended up picking 6, the kaleidoscopic one.

I wanted to use about the same amount of each color, so I adjusted the thick medium-purple stripes to be only two stripes thick, instead of 3 stripes thick.

I can't remember, but I'm pretty sure I did a stripe swatch to make sure I liked it.  Of course I did, right?  In what world do I not swatch every tiny thing?