I've started! White Buffalo Poncho

My first commissioned project! If you can call it that because I refused payment after she spent like, $70 on yarn, but she did send me a $20 Panera card :) VERY nice surprise!

The cast-on was a royal pain and it's increasing the incentive to do this sucker all in one piece. I didn't feel comfortable doing the long tail cast-on because when I tried it the other day, I just wasn't getting the twist to the yarn that they'd described and it pulled apart in at least three places. I couldn't buy the new needles til yesterday though, so the night before, I took one of the border color pucks and rewound it into a ball. Didn't think it would do the trick, but I think it helped because when I finally set out to cast on yesterday, doing a simple slip knot approach, the yarn held up much better. What sucks is when I do it that way, the yarn seems to increase exponentially in space between the needles when I transfer, which means adding stitches like every couple. I started out with 128 and probably had at least 150 by the end. So I'm about 7/8 of the way to transferring onto the circulars and it pulls apart. Now, I'm getting used to the concept of unspun so there wasn't much cursing involved; it's easy to remedy but could result in a weak spot. But then I took a good look at what was there so far and decided to count my stitches. 127. I'll take that! Started really knitting after that and got the first 2 inches or so started. Looks like I'll use 1 ball per border, can't tell yet how much the body will take. Still pretty nervous about the Vneck, but that's because this yarn is so thick compared to what I'm used to, that I'm uncertain how to move forward once I get there, and scared of it pulling apart near a bind-off. But that's a good 20 inches from now, so I've got time to study it.

LOVE this yarn! This poncho's gonna be so warm! How could they discontinue this line? I'm getting positively spoiled working with it; and I'll bet it makes it a little harder to go back to my wool/acrylic blends when I'm done with it. I'll still like to buy some for myself; I'll have to jump into Yarn Forward and do some calculations.