It turns out that colorwork on tiny needles is just the perfect thing to keep my hands busy and my brain amused on the train to work (and even on the rare evening at home where there is time to knit between dinner and bed).

I must say that I’m rather smitten with the way the color changes are working out:

The brown started off very dark at the bottom of the corrugated ribbing section, then lightened again, and is now gradually darkening as I knit up the body. The orange is also cycling between very bright, high-contrast spots and darker, almost-brown areas. The color repeats in the yarn are fairly long, though, so the color changes gradually across the sweater, just like leaves turning color in the fall.

I’ve never tried using a variegated yarn in colorwork before, though of course I have seen examples of beautiful Kauni sweaters done using long color repeats. My repeats are much shorter and more subtle (there really are sections where it’s hard to tell the brown from the orange/red, and vice versa), but so far I am really happy with the results.

The one fly in the ointment is the corrugated rib. I absolutely love how it looks, and I think it will do a beautiful job of tying in the green sleeve/side panel yarn with the rest of the sweater body, but if it’s not held firmly in place it does this:

There just does not seem to be any way to make it lay flat. I did quite a bit of reading about corrugated rib before casting on, and the results were unanimous: it doesn’t stretch well, and you should not go down a needle size to knit it. That surprised me, but I knit my swatch and it worked beautifully, so I decided to bow to the wisdom of the internets and knit it on the same size needle.

I’m not sure that the flipping up is a matter of gauge, though I do think that it would have worked out better knit on a smaller needle. Playing with the fabric, I think that the problem might be that I have two layers of very thick fabric (the corrugated rib and the colorwork are both double-thick) separated by 4 rows of stockinette, which is less thick. Those few rows are just enough to make that section of the sweater want to bend, and then the stiffness of the corrugated rib does the rest.

I’m hoping that it will relax into place with blocking, but if it doesn’t I may need to sew in a strip of grosgrain ribbon to hold it in place. If that doesn’t work, I’ll snip a stitch, remove the rib, and reknit it from the top down. A good blocking cures a multitude of wrongs, though, so hopefully it will decide to behave once it’s been finished properly.