Rules

So I've spent nearly a week writing about the rules I used to create the design for the sweater. They're guidelines, really. But having rules when I started meant that I could make it up as I went along but still have something that didn't look ad-libbed. It looks like I thought it through from the word go.

To recap, the rules are

1. There will be stripes of colour: first green, then grey, then pink.
2. No patterned stripe will repeat itself.
3. Every stripe will have some black.
4. The stripes of colour will alternate between black backgrounds and coloured backgrounds
5. If the background is black, the pattern will be picked out at least two stitches wide
6. Within a single stripe, the colours will change between one extreme of light and dark and back again. They will do that twice in the same order and then they will reverse the order for two stripes.
7. The patterns will align in a sensible way; repeats of 3, 4, 6, 8, or 12 only are permissible.

And with that (and some good pattern library books) a pretty sweater emerged.