Epic, ASJ: Sleeve Considerations

Yesterday I said I was just going to knit every ball of yarn with out fussing about distributing the stripes in any special way.

However, I'm backtracking on that statement.

The pattern, as written, apparently makes a short sleeve coat. To make the sleeves longer, after you've knit and cast off the body, you pick up stitches along the edges of the sleeves and knit down.

I occurred to me that if I just knit through every ball by the time I get to working the sleeves the only yarn I might have left are the two straight green ones.

It will be very jarring to have a mostly purple coat with green sleeves.

I'm debating how to get around this problem.

One option would be to knit half, or some portion, of each of the large balls into the body and retain the remainder for the sleeves. The issue there might be that I leave too much yarn for the sleeves and then end up with leftovers.

Another option is to work full on stripes. Maybe 10 rows or so in each color in the order I had settled on. This would make an even distribution of the colors and I wouldn't have to worry so much about leftovers.

It's not really an issue yet since all I managed to do last night is cast on. And I don't foresee getting to work on it tonight because I have some stealth knitting that has to take priority.

This all means I have some time to ruminate on it. But, after seeing it in black and white, I think I'm leaning toward stripes.