A cou­ple of weeks ago I com­plete­ly ran out of knit­ting and cro­chet­ing projects (GASP!) and was feel­ing antsy watch­ing Net­flix with­out yarn and needles/hook in my hands. I’ve been knit­ting and cro­chet­ing for a while now, (that’s an under­state­ment. It’s been decades.) and while I like sim­ple designs, it may be time to stretch and chal­lenge myself a bit. Also, it might be good to work on a project that takes longer because I’m kind of run­ning out of stor­age space for new sweaters and cardigans… 

So! I’ve been eye­ing the Enchant­ed Mesa sweater for a long time but always thought it’s wayyyy beyond my skill lev­el main­ly because it’s knit­ted in the round. I usu­al­ly stay away from projects that are knit­ted in the round. But then Mike point­ed out how he does­n’t under­stand why I say I can’t knit in the round when I can knit almost every­thing else. It was a ques­tion I could­n’t answer. So I thought I must give it a try!

I real­ly like the asym­met­ri­cal-ness of the sweater, and that it’s meant to be knit­ted with odd balls of stash yarn. I have many many many odd balls of stash yarn. And I real­ly like the patch­work look.

So first, the pat­tern says to do a pro­vi­sion­al cast-on. In the round. O_O

So I looked up pro­vi­sion­al cast-on, and mag­ic loop, because the cir­cu­lar nee­dle I have is longer than the cir­cum­fer­ence of the col­lar. (linked the tuto­ri­als I used above in case it’s use­ful to you too!)

Here we have it, knit­ting in the round, pro­vi­sion­al cast-on, mag­ic loop. Nee­dles crossed, eyes crossed, fid­dled for a while, sev­er­al false starts, but I even­tu­al­ly got the hang of knit­ting in the round with a mag­ic loop! :D

But then the next part of the pat­tern is knit­ting short rows back and forth (thank good­ness!), and I could­n’t wrap my head around how I could go from mag­ic loop to knit­ting back and forth. So I decid­ed that I was going to get a short­er cir­cu­lar nee­dle (16″) so I don’t have to do the mag­ic loop. A bit sad that I won’t be using my new skills in this project but at lease I know I can do it!

I should also point out that when I bought the Enchant­ed Mesa pat­tern on Rav­el­ry it comes with the Out­er Space pat­tern also, which is a chunky ver­sion of Enchant­ed Mesa. So I’m com­bin­ing the two pat­terns a bit, using 1x1 rib for the col­lar, because I’m using a stiff acrylic (what a lot of my stash yarn con­sists of, and I was­n’t going to use a nice wool for some­thing I don’t have a lot of con­fi­dence mak­ing in case I mess up :P) and it just won’t drape nice­ly if I try to make a cowl col­lar. I also decid­ed to for­go the pro­vi­sion­al cast-on to make every­thing eas­i­er for myself. I made the ribbed col­lar extra tall so it can be fold­ed down or left up, for an avant garde look, I guess. 

I also had to mod­i­fied the num­ber of cast-on stitch­es and rows in each sec­tion because of the heav­ier yarn I’m using and I want­ed a more fit­ted sweater than what is shown. The many project pages on Rav­el­ry helped a lot.

Slow­ly tak­ing shape! So excit­ed about the asym­met­ri­cal sections! 

Here’s where I’m at cur­rent­ly. Divid­ed for sleeve and placed stitch­es on waste yarn (anoth­er achieve­ment unlocked!) and work­ing on the body. It’s a lot of fun decid­ing on the next colours as I go. It’s my favourite way to knit I think :)

Will keep you post­ed on this knit­ting adventure! 

Have a great week­end, every­one! :D