Full retreat

Buffy, brilliant!  I had to read your post twice to realize that you were knitting from both ends of each ball because you have two coat sections with identical striping on the needles at once. I can see that your "tangle" problems would be annoying without your clever solution.


By the way, the white-and-blue-china jugs and vases are knitted by stranding the blues and whites back and forth. It's the patches that are knitted intarsia with each other and with the jugs. 


I actually don't have quiet the tangle problem you might suppose. Kaffe Fassett suggests using short pieces of yarn: just pull the end that you are using at the moment out of the bird's nest of yarns that instantly accumulates. That works well as long as you knit in all those loose end as you the new pieces of yarn. Short pieces of yarn also let you control the marbling in the jugs and across the patches -- the colors more the merrier. 


On Mother's Day I found these small balls of Kool-Aid dyed yarn left from a sweater made for our shared grandson. I'll knit them into the coat. They are in a  colander that my mom used weekly to make cottage cheese when I was a kid--maybe it was her mother's or grandmother's. The colander tops a wooden waste basket that will be handy for all those snips of yarn.

Five quick rows of knitting were enough to conclude that the coat fabric looked somewhat like a heavy bath mat, and hard. Soldier on! No, BLOW RETREAT.


I frogged the coat. What to do? As KF would also say, just add more yarn!  I checked WEBS and found Shibui Silk Cloud, a glowing core of silk surrouded by a whisp of mohair. Laceweight, there's 330 yards per 25 grams. It will give both very subtle glow and a touch of softening haze to the Jug Coat. The patch colors all fall into three colorways, blues, browns and reds, so along with ivory, I'll only need four colors of Silk Cloud. I'll add a strand of Silk Cloud to each patch nearest the colorway, and a strand of ivory to the china. The dark blue of the china will stand alone.  It does add another 12 breaks of yarn across each line of row of four patches, 16 across the rows with half-patches, and for the sleeve rows ....


So the Jug Coat will no longer be made totally from stash. Bummer. Initially I'll purchase just 25 grams each of rust, mulberry, dragonfly and ivory.  WEBS has the dragonfly blue on backorder, but I was lucky to find a Raveler in Texas who wanted to destash a skein. (I gave her "Just Enough Ruffles" a red heart!) All the colors should be in hand by the weekend. And then a new start.