Figuring It Out

Here is the current situation.

I've discovered a couple of things. I thought of the middle largest strip to be the main color, with the other lines following and crossing it. However, as I go along, I see that the more I work around the middle line, the farther out a crossing has to happen. For example, when I add a new strip, it can't get right next to the middle strip anymore. I'm wondering if this will make the final piece difficult to read, that it will lose the sense of strips crossing each other, and turn into puzzle pieces instead.

I guess we'll find out.

I'd also thought that I could just keep going in one direction as I knitted, because that's how it worked out for the first couple of strips. I cast on, and then increased at the end of the ridge when I wanted to make a corner. Well, that works fine for the bottom pieces, but now that I'm adding strips at the top edge, it doesn't work so well.

Here's why, and what I did to work around it.

We are looking at the strip with the letters and arrows. The first row of that color was cast on at A, with the knitting going right to left in the usual fashion. It had to go in that direction so as to have a clean line with the adjoining color (the other direction would have given us a purl ridge, with the colors mixed). So far, so good. I increased a stitch every time I got to the edge to keep the shape.

At point B, to make the corner, all I had to do was cast off the stitches I didn't need any longer, and continue on. Still easy.

At C, I got to the difficulty. The D edge (in yellow) had to be picked up right to left, so I couldn't just keep knitting from C down, because that would have been left to right. Well, I could have just cut the yarn and started at D, but I didn't like more loose ends if I didn't need them.

So I made a very loose loop of yarn from the edge down to D, and then just knitted it in at the back, like you do to knit in a yarn tail. It is much tidier looking, and no ends to ever get loose. I did the same thing when I got to F.

Here is what the back looks like, with arrows to the knitted in loops.

Very tidy, which if you've seen some other entries here, is not always my strong suit.

By the way, here is the collection of yarn that I am using.

Not all of them may make it into the final product. I'm saving the Cocoon purple on the bottom left for the edging.