Long Leaf Coat knitting solutions

Buffy, I really am fortunate to have this large colored grid remake of Kaffe's Long Leaf Coat pattern. It is easy to keep my place and make the color changes correctly,  now even more so that I have marked every tenth stitch with a small black synthetic rubber O-ring. The O-rings are soft and easy to slip.  Purchase them in a packet of two dozen at the local hardware store for about $2.

Now my LL coat "reads" just like the 10-grid in the pattern, with it's heavy black line every 10 stitches.

I mark the pattern line I am knitting with a strip of post-it tape placed over the working line so that I can see the stitch pattern that is on the needle along with the one being knitted. The tape is easy to move up to the next row each time I finish the visible row, and it is easy to lift for a peek if it covers one of the boxed color notations.

A small change in yarn handling -- a more accurate term would be yarn "wrangling" -- is making a large difference. Note in the first picture that the yarn is always composed of two strands of color. At first I changed each strand of the 2 colors in a different spot, thinking that it would make a stronger fabric. In reality, I was stopping twice as often as I knit with short pieces of yarn. Now I make sure that the two strands are identical in length and add length to both of them at the same time. cutting my stops and starts in half. I don't think the fabric is any less strong, and now I can knit across a row in less than an hour.

Happy holiday tomorrow!