WIP Wednesday - Red and Blue

Two new sweaters on the needles, and neither one for me ;) But that's okay - it means I get lovely yarn to play with that other people have purchased for me!!! :-)

First, for my oldest sister, Boticelli Red Blue. The yarn is a cotton-bamboo blend and I love it :)
The colour is slightly off - it has more of a greenish tint in real life.

I found a pretty significant error in the pattern though - the row count suddenly jumped 100 rows for no apparent reason! I checked with the designer and yup - typo :) The only reason I even noticed is that I'm using yarn with a different gauge than the one given in the pattern, and rather than moving down to teeny-tiny needles to obtain correct gauge (which I doubt would look good anyway), I'm attempting to change the pattern to fit my yarn. It's the first time I've ever tried anything of the sort, so I'm very curious to see how it'll work out - and taking copious notes while knitting the back, so I can replicate it for the front. Maths FTW ;) I wish I could have figured out how to work it in the round though, but that's slightly above my abilities yet.

Second up is a sweater for a dear friend of mine. We first started talking about me knitting her a sweater last year, but things got sidetracked by our move. I recently brought it up again, and we spent a couple of delightful afternoons looking through Ravelry for the perfect pattern. I think we found it too with Drops' Chocolate Passion. We found her some GORGEOUS deep red yarn (the colour here is way off - it doesn't look orange at all in real life!) and I finally got to cast on :)
Definitely the most elaborate thing I've tried knitting yet! But I've tried cables before and know that they look much more difficult than they actually are :) The only problem is that I'm really not a fan of Drops patterns. They seem to go out of their way to write them in as convoluted a way as possible. Not to mention that the charts are much too messy for proper printing. I'm reading through it carefully, trying to make sense of things before I start knitting them (which is pretty much the opposite of what I usually do, because I find it easier to 'make sense of things' when I actually have the needles in my hands, but there's so much of "while you did that you should also have done this" that I have to with this one). I'm still learning how to count rows from the cable stitches, but think I'll manage alright once I get properly going.