Border's done, now to decrease & decrease & decrease, etc....

I finished the border after I measured it against the HK'd one which luckily I didn't unravel yet and the MK'd one measured the same as the finished one with only 661 rows.  So then I had a dilemma, do I keep on going or do I go ahead and quit now.   Well, really that was a no-brainer, who wants to continue on for another couple hundred rows which seem to take forever when the thing was big enough already.   So I quit and started picking up stitches with my HK needles.   Now I can start another sweater on the machine while I HK this in the evening.  At least that's the plan.

I worried about how I was going to figure out how in the world to pick up 363 stitches on 661 rows, the pattern said pick up along the edge, every other row.  Well, I finally decided to just start picking up.  I counted out and marked every 100 rows and picked up evenly around.  When I was through I counted how many stitches I had and saw that I didn't have enough so joined it into a circle and knitted a row, increasing evenly around until I had 363.  Surely there's an easier way to do this but that's what I did.

After I had the proper number of stitches which I felt was important because the pattern calls for evenly decreasing so many rows until you come to the center and the decreases are really pretty if they are all lined up from border to center.   So in the picture above you see my finished border and the first 9 rows.  The makrers show every 10 stitches because I must decrease every so many rows at the markers.   This will go much faster than the border did even though its just plain knitting because I'm decreasing so many stitches often.   Once this is done I feel I might be able to do the sleeves on the machine although I guess I need to swatch on the machine and maybe chart out the sleeves with Knitware software.   That should work, right?  I hope so, I really want this done for Christmas.