So, it begins…

Day 2, The #CowParade Project

So now that I have my cow and my yarn (and an all important deadline), I need to start the project.

But it’s not as if you can go on Ravelry and search for a sweater pattern fit for a cow. I actually need to do quite a bit of math and measuring. 

One of the first things to measure is gauge: how many stitches and rows per inch for a given yarn thickness and needle size.  When I told fellow knitters about this project, after they stopped laughing, they recommended I use really large needles so the knitting would go faster. While each yarn does have a recommended needle size,  you can push it a little. So I tried knitting with size 11 (8 mm needles) and got a 2.5 stitches per inch gauge, but the needles were awkward to hold.

I went down to 10.5 (6.5 mm needles) and while the gauge went up to 3 stitches per inch, they were much more comfortable to hold and knit with. 

It will mean more stitches to knit in total, but if I can knit faster and with greater ease on slightly smaller needles, it will be worth it.

The next thing to measure was the cow itself. When I’m creating a sweater for a person, it’s a lot simpler to take a few key measurements and plug them in to a basic pattern/recipe. (Shout-out to Tin Can Knits and their Strange Brew recipe!)

It’s not quite that straightforward for a cow. The main issue is the front legs aren’t arranged at opposite ends of the torso like in people. So I did a ton of measuring and sketched several views of the cow with relevant numbers.

Armed with these numbers and the knowledge from knitting many, many sweaters in the round, I started to notate the pattern for my cow.

I cast on 130 stitches + 3 for the steek and started the neck ribbing. While I usually do lopapeysas bottom up, I’m working this one top down, so in case I run out of time, I can just make the sweater a bit more cropped.

Tomorrow, I’ll start the first motif.