GAAA Preparation

I am almost finished with the second sleeve of my Pea Pod sweater and hope to be finished completely with the project in about a week or so. I've already decided to try to finish up my lace Glorianna scarf next. I'm at least half way done with that and it shouldn't take long to finish that. Then I will have nothing on the needles . . .

That's just scary. Once I finished a project, had nothing else on needles and it took me several days to come up with the next project. It was agonizing to be stuck in such a limbo with myself. Work on this or that? Indecision kills me every time!

So in preparation for the next-next project to cast on I decided to work a square from The Great American Aran Afghan (KAL link) since it is one of my 2008 resolutions to finish it this year. I can't remember which one I picked but this afternoon I photo copied the chart page and turned it from this:


To this:


Isn't it beautiful? So organized and clearly labeled! So easy to see which cable to use with just a glance! I learned this trick from ArtLady over at KnittingHelp and I'm sure many other people do this as well. I started color coding my cable charts for the Aran Sweater that I made and now I'm completely hooked! I've probably even talked about it here before but I don't care - it helped me so much that it bears repeating.

My personal technique is to use matching colors for similar stitches. For example, 2 of the cables are worked over only 3 stitches so I chose red and blue. For another set I used green and gold. For the last set I ran out of matching colors (my colored pencils set is missing a few) so I choose pink and brown because they greatly contrasted each other. It doesn't really matter what colors you use as long as there's a way to make them significant enough for you to remember which symbol they're for.

I may be getting ahead of myself but I'm excited to cast on another GAAA square. I thought about color coding the lace charts as I start to get into more complicated patterns. I'm not ready to work those yet but when I am this should definitely help.