This time, it was pretty clear early on that I was going to need to do the opposite. Not early enough to talk me into frogging and starting over–besides, I had forgotten that, much as I love knitting baby alpaca, when it’s spun fine it’s going to have a lot of bounce in it and it’s going to want to jump off the needles. Which it did a few times. The mill was trying to balance between the merino’s need for lots of twist and the alpaca’s need not to. It was soft, it was pretty, and it’s a tossup whether my eyes or my hands fell in love with the skein first but it was not the most fun knit ever and I wasn’t going to do any extra stitches I didn’t have to–done wanted to stay done. So I improvised.
MadTosh’s Eyre Light, it turns out, is discontinued. It’s on sale in the link; I didn’t find any other current sources. Our Local Yarn Store where my skein came from might yet have a few.
What I did was that after double-decrease-finishing the tops of triangles, then on what would have been a wrong side row had I not been knitting in the round I did the two decreases per ten stitches without their matching yarn overs, ie, by not having a rest row before going straight to those decreases I made it look as if the previous yarn overs flowed right in there as much as possible.
The narrowing was less drastic than I’d imagined and I have to lay the cowl flat to see which way goes up. It flows well, even if it changed how the colorwork moves.
It looks a bit of a hodgepodge lying there but you put it on and see the tree rings and it’s just perfect. And so soft. I’m glad I bought it and I’m glad I made it and I’m glad I don’t have to do it again.
I think it’s okay to cut the yarn and run the ends in now.