My Spritz Stripes KAL is moving right along – I’m always so excited to see everyone’s progress :-) We’re now on clue 2 and we’ve already have a few knitters get to the finish point!

I’m very impressed with all of you knitting out there – there are a few difficult details in the sweater but everyone is just powering right on. The body was worked straight up but the stitch pattern increases and decreases within each pattern repeat so it requires careful attention to the stitch count ….. with occasional unknitting to keep it all in check.

The second clue is for the back section of the upper body. This uses a similar but slightly different stitch pattern than for the body. This is so that there are no changes in the stitch count to allow for easier neck and shoulder shaping. It’s enough keeping track of lace with short rows without adding varied stitch counts into the mix!

If any of you out there are working on this KAL but having difficulty with the short rows in lace you could take a look at my Craftsy Short Row Techniques class that covers this in one of the lessons (here’s a 50% discount link). Short rows in lace actually work surprisingly well – as there are so many decrease and increase stitches you’d never notice a loose stitch from a short row!

You will find though that when you do short rows across the shoulder with each row getting progressively shorter (and also working a different row in the lace) when you get to the final full row it’s going to be on a different row of the lace for each short row step. You can either embrace this as a feature of short rows in lace or if it bugs you you could also just do the final row in stockinette stitch.

Before my trip to Columbus for TNNA at the end of this month I’m releasing a new pattern in Anzula yarn, Cole. Keep an eye out for it; should be released within the next couple of days…. here’s a quick peek!