Birthday sweater plans?! The Libra in me approves

 I have an idea that I am dying to do, if it gets done by my birthday (October 15th) it will be a miracle. An ode to the last year of my twenties, if you will. 

The Orsonero pattern has been on my mind a lot lately; it gives elevated baseball t-shirt, but make it a sweater. 

However, the pattern has such a beautiful blank stockinette canvas just begging for a fun design-- I can't NOT add a little extra. I've been thinking about this pattern so much so that I daydreamed too close to the sun and made a color work chart today while at lunch. 

Here is my process: I started out in Canva by drafting a design-- I played around with the colors before looking for yarn so I knew what colors to scout out. The below yarns are closest to the OG colors I used but not exact, so I used the color dropper to pick up the colors from each skein of yarn, and added them to the design.

 

Then I uploaded my design as a knit colorwork to Stitchfiddle (I had to first do the math to determine the amount of space needed in my design-- since the graph is for the front of the sweater, all I needed to know was the number of stitches in the front panel starting at the last increase row. The size I want to use (depending on my gauge swatch- we will see lol) has 79 stitches total at its widest part. Uploading an image to stitch fiddle isn't exact, so I had to change a lot of elements around; like completely remaking the butterflies, but it makes for a good base so you aren't working from a blank canvas. 

I copied this canvas and completely erased the front panel design to make my back panel design which was simple enough to make by copy and pasting the butterfly from my front panel and using the cursor to write out the letters. I will most definitely be using a duplicate stitch for this part (and the front panel butterflies)

This is just a little look into my creative process, and to show how much fun you can have making patterns your own. 

Is it weird to make a birthday sweater for my 29th year around the sun? I don't think so! With the leftover yarn, I'm also hoping to make a pair of striped shorts to go with it (the gears never stop turning).

<3

Lizzy