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More swatching

The Ursula pattern is well written, but I'm finding it overly prescriptive. I've come to the button bands, and Kate Davies says to pick up 88 stitches. Well, this doesn't work for me, because I made it into a v-neck. And I would always rather a designer write "pick up x stitches for x rows" than prescribe a number of stitches. I did work out that she means pick up 3 stitches for every four rows. But people on Ravelry have used a range of different ratios - 2 in 3, 3 in 4 and even one to one. So I did what Barbara Walker told me to, and put a button band on my swatch:


And what I learnt is that a 3 to 4 ratio seems to work. The only problem is I started casting off with a stretchy cast of (near the top of the photo) and I thought it looked messy, so I switched to a less stretchy one. It looks better, but on my Decimal, the cardigan itself has grown a little over time, but the overly tight cast off could not, so the button band pulls now, although it did not when I finished it.  But I don't think colour work at a dense gauge stretches out like that. Oh, well, I have a rather large number of stitches to pick up and knit before I have to make this decision.

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