Inishturk sweater started...

Finally got the yarn on the needles baby. Wasn't as easy as it sounds though.

First the crazy gauge. This is my first Knit-along, so I've been pretty excited about the sense of community and connection with other knitters. And one thing they've all been saying is that this gauge is a joke.

It's suggested that a size 8 needle and 16 sts across will produce 4" in a Double Seed stitch.
With 8s, I got 3" and with 9s, I got 3.5" (Here is the rest of the math, for my fellow Inishturkers)
I thought about going to 10s or even 11s, as some people have, but wanted to keep the definition in the cables. Some people have opted to use the 8s, but make a larger size to compensate. I was looking for the Size Small (40 in chest), but at the gauge I was knitting, I would have to knit what Lion calls a 1x in order to get a size small sweater... really?? Sounds like alot of stitches to me... I made a compromise. I decided to use size 9 needles and knit a "medium," which would give me close to a small size.

THEN, after I finally figured that out, I got to deal with this whopper of a pattern. Whew! Of all the projects I could've picked for my first knit-along, my first sweater, my first real cables... it had to be this one. Nothing like baptism by fire.

The whole process is much more complicated by the fact that for some reason, the instructions are basically given in an UP DOWN pattern, when everyone knows we knit SIDE to SIDE. Who wrote this thing???

So I basically burned 2 or 3 hours of my life on earth converting each cable pattern into its row sequence one by one. I really hope I am not the only one who will ever benefit from this, so I uploaded it to share with the world:
Lion Brand Knit Along Inishturk Stitch pattern Conversion -
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dgp76r8n_0czmx5xcw

Hopefully I'll have more progress to show soon. o_0