Swatching for Hild

A while ago I fell in love with Hild by Elsebeth Lavold. I was, at the time, rather furious at the conciseness of the pattern. One swatch later:



I think I'll be changing almost everything anyway.

I'm so damn new that even swatching is still a learning experience for me. Look at this -- you can see exactly where I remembered reading somewhere about slipping the first stitch on every row of something that's knitted flat.



And here's me messing up the beginning of the closed cable on the first pattern repeat:



Yikes, cringeworthy. It wasn't entirely my fault though. The beginning of the closed cable involved two sets of increases on subsequent right sides, with a plain wrong-side row in between; the end of the closed cable involved two sets of increases on subsequent rows -- right side and then wrong side! No wonder it closes up so nice and tight and pretty.



My second attempt is much tighter, as you can see, and also done over only two rows. However, it still has something I don't like: I did it right-side and then wrong-side, forcing me to do an extra plain right-side row before beginning to move the cables around. The better place for that plain right-side row would be between the patterns, so that all cable points can be 2 stitches wide on a wrong-side row and 4 stitches wide on a right-side row.

What else might I be changing about the pattern, you wonder? Well, my size doesn't have anything written out for it anyway, so, all stitch counts. The sleeve cap instructions don't make a nice sinusoid, so, the sleeve pattern. I don't want to change to larger needles for the cable section (no boobs), and I don't want to knit plain rib sleeves when a repeat or two of the cable pattern looks so nice on my forearm. And I don't want to roll back my sleeves the way that model is... I'd rather they fit me. I think I'm turning grumpanese I think I'm turning grumpanese I really think so...

I have company though. And like me, my kitty Nala always prefers patterns to written instructions. They make MUCH better pillows.