Penguono – Step 1

It didn’t take me long to tackle this project. Not long after finishing the earlier blog post, I went to the yarn stash with a bag and came back with a pile of yarn, ready to swatch and cast on for Penguono.

Yarn for Penguono

The road to stash obsession was paved with good intentions. When I first began buying yarn, it was exclusively sock yarn and most of it, I wound into cakes as soon as it arrived and, for some crazy reason, didn’t even keep the tag so I have no idea what some of the yarn is – content, brand . . nothing.

Yarn for First Section

These are the yarns I will start with. I may create a “fade” as I go. I may not. Whatever I want to do is fine with this project.

Swatch

Here’s the fabric. Based on needle sizes used by others, I started with 6.5 mm needles. I needed 5 stitches per inch and 11 rows per inch. With the 6.5 mm needles, I was getting a bit more than 4 stitches per inch and wasn’t even counting the row gauge. I switched down to 6 mm needles and got almost 4.75 stitches per inch so I’m going to cast on the real project with 5.5 mm needles. The row gauge isn’t close. I’m getting not quite 7 rows per inch. I can’t imagine getting 11 rows per inch using three stands so I’m going to go down to two strands.

I think I’m going to need to use two strands of yarn to get the size I need so I’m going to cast on using two strands, and if it works, it will be part of the project. If not, I’ll consider it another swatch and try again with a different needle size.