Not much to look at yet, but here it is:

I have cast on an done about 9 rows on my Rogue sweater (pattern available here).  I’m using  Rowan All Seasons Cotton in a beautiful dark green.  My gauge from my swatch was 4.65 st/inch.  The pattern calls for 4.5 st/inch - so I’m pretty darn close. Given that I tend to loosen up a bit when knitting large sweaters, I’m hoping it will come out just right.

The size I wanted to make it somewhere between the Large and Xtra large size. I’m also modifying the pattern to be a cardigan.  In order to do this, I needed to add a few stitches.  Normally Rogue is knit in the round, but I’m using cotton and I don’t trust myself to get a very neat edge by doing a steek on this thing.  So I’m knitting it back and forth.   When you do this you end up knitting back and forth as follows:

   RIGHT FRONT    <cable>     BACK        <cable>      LEFT FRONT

The pattern uses an odd number of stitches for the front and back portions.  To split the front into left and right, you need to add one stitch.  To keep the back the same size, you should add a stitch there as well.

I wanted to increase the size of the sweater by about 1.5 inches:

RIGHT FRONT: +1 to make total # of front stitches an even number
       +2 to increase the size a bit
<cable>
BACK  +4 to increase size
         +1 to make total # of bac stitches even
<cable>
LEFT FRONT: +2 to increase size a bit

So I’m adding a total of 10 stitches to the pattern.   Notice the number of stitches added to the back and front match up to be 5 for each.

Once I get a few inches into the body I’ll see how it’s fitting around me and if it’s too big or too small.

A local Rogue-along prompted me to get out some of my possible yarns for this project and do some swatching:

On the left, Rowan’s All Seasons Cotton in a deep forest green.  A smooth yarn that is Cotton and Acrylic, it shows the cable off really well. (never mind the bad photo).

On the right, Second Time Cotton, Mostly Cotton, some Acrylic. It’s a smooth yarn with a lot of plies making up the individual strand.  I don’t think it will work well for Rogue.  It’s a bit splitty to knit with and the variation of the color in each strand would hide the beautiful cabling in Rogue.  As you can see I abandoned the swatch pretty early on.  No time wasted here!

My last swatch (not pictured) is with Mission Falls 1824 Wool.  100% Superwash wool, this will probably be the easiest yarn to knit the sweater with because of the elasticity of the wool. It’s a smooth yarn and the cable shows up very nicely in it. 

So far the All Seasons Cotton is winning the swatch race, mainly because it’s a stash yarn. I have more than enough to make the sweater in any of the sizes (we won’t go into _which_ size I’ll be making. heh).  If I used the Mission Falls yarn I’d have to make a trip to the LYS and spend some money, and the likely hood that they would have to order the amount I’d need for the sweater is about 50/50.

I had some other yarns in my stash that I had mentally put in the Rogue bucket:  Rowan Wool/Cotton and some Rowan 4 ply.  Neither of these was thick enough to even come close to the required gauge for Rogue.  I don’t want to have to recalculate that much, and I really feel the cables need to be in the thicker Aran weight yarn to show well.