Believe it or not, my first ideas for Knitamus didn't even include the chart view. I was just thinking about keeping repeating notes straight for myself in things like this sweater. (And, no, it hasn't been blocked yet.)
In retrospect, I think the smart thing to do would be knit the cable yoke, then pick up stitches for the neck and body/sleeves. But that's not what I did (possibly it was a semi-rational choice to start all the ribbing with a tubular cast on instead of finishing it with a tubular cast off and the attendant endless grafting, but I think I just wasn't thinking). No, I knit the sweater and the sleeves and joined them to start the yoke and then did the first decrease round and then provisionally cast on for the upper yoke AND for the yoke cable and proceeded to knit it on as I went.
This was tricky. Partly because knitting things on is always a little trickier than just plain knitting, but mostly because of the curve. And math.
I knew I needed to pull in an extra existing stitch every 6 rows of the cable. But I was working a short row in each cable repeat on the outside edge to make the cable curve for the yoke. So there was an extra end-of-row on the outside edge every time.
Honestly, I think I would have gone a little batty trying to keep straight the cable pattern and the never-matching-up extra stitch attachments on my own. But if you ever get yourself in this situation, fear not! It actually wasn't that bad with Knitamus.
One 7-row repeat handled the notes for the 6-row cable, plus the extra short row, and the extra stitch attachment on the inner edge (because that always lined up with the cable, every 6th row of a 6-row cable, the short row being meaningless on the inner edge). One more 6-row repeat reminded me when to use up two stitches when attaching to the outside curve, which came at different points in the cable each time as the 7-row repeat cycled through its paces separately.
I think that sounded complicated.
How about a simpler example? The sleeves on the baby's sweater increased every 8 rows. But the cable pattern covered 6 rows. Two separate repeating notes, no worries. :)
