Otters love to crochet...SWEATERS

I work at a library, and run a twice-a-month group of knitters and crocheters, where we all get together and work on projects for two hours and gossip and show each other how to do stuff and have a lot of fun. People donate big bags of yarn to us, and a lot of things people make (but not all of them) go to charity. Whenever a big bag of yarn is donated, we all have a wonderful time sorting through it and taking yarn for projects.

One such bag had a lot of partial skeins in pinks and reds, and I thought of a project I had seen one of the other ladies do, with colors and kinds of yarn all randomly mixed up together...so I snagged about 10 different skeins of red, pink, maroon and scarlet, including some red eyelash yarn and some red/pink variegated, and then went to Michael's and got a 1 Pound skein of a pinkish maroon as a base color, and went for it.

After thinking about it for a long time, here's how I'm making it (and it's not done yet, as I type this, so progress reports will follow. The picture is as far as I've gotten).

I decided to alternate the base color, the big skein, with other colors. The base color is always a row of single crochet, and the other stripes will be whatever is in the bag that I think will look good at that point, and those rows are half double crochet.

The ribbing at the wrists and bottom are of the base color, and every time I do a row of that I do two rows of ribbing, turning it after the first row, one row of which is for the row of the other color. The ribbing is single crochet in the back loops.

The stripes are sort of L shaped, starting at the bottom and going up, then out to the end of the sleeve. I have a center row of the base color, then the stripes are symmetrical going out from there.

So here's how I started it:

Make a row of chains as long as the distance from wherever you want the bottom of this sweater to be, up to your collarbone. Put a marker 11 stitches from the bottom (the ribbing is 10 stitches). Make sure you put this marker on the side where the chains are Vs, rather than the back side, because this marker will let you know which is the right side of your sweater while you're making the front and the back.
Put another marker on the chains where your collarbone is. Continue chaining about 4 more inches, put another marker there. Then hold the collarbone marker where it's supposed to go, and the second marker on your neck at the top of your shoulder, and continue the chains to wherever you want the end of the wristband to hit you. Put another marker 11 stitches in from the end of the wrist. Pull through, leaving about 3 inches, and cut it off.
Attach the yarn at the collarbone marker, chain four inches, mark and chain the same length you did on the other side. Mark the 11th stitch, pull through and cut the yarn.
So what you now have is a y, with markers at 4 inches from where they come together. This is the front center line and the tops of the shoulders of one side of the sweater (you'll do two sides and sew them together).
Every time you do a color, you'll do it on both sides of that center chain, the same color. As you're looking at the sweater laid out on a table in a kind of Y, with the right side marker facing you, you'll start at the bottom on the right side of the marker, and crochet out to the wrist, then on the other side you'll start at the wrist and crochet back to the bottom front. This will make the stitches look alike from the front.
So pick your next color, and half double crochet from the marker above the front ribbing, crocheting on the right side, to the wrist marker. Then on the other side, crochet from the wrist marker back to the bottom front.
Then do a row of your base color, single crocheting, and doing two rows of ribbing on each end of the row, slipstitching it to the other color so there's no hole (you do this every time). Also, starting with this row, skip one loop at each of the middle markers, the collarbone one and the top-of-shoulder one, in each row. This will pull the shoulders down til they become perpendicular with the front, and also make the neck a nice V.

Here's a closeup of the front:

I'm still on this part. Here's the THEORY for the rest of the sweater, I'll let you know how it comes out. Here's the end, as I see it:

I've finished all the decreases at the markers, and this side of the sweater is nicely shaped.

Now I'm continuing as I started until the wrist ribbing has gotten to half the size of my wrists, at which point it's done. Then I'm going to make each row of crochet out to the wrist a bit shorter, although I'm still trying to decide how many stitches I'm going to shorten it in each row.

When I'm at the poing where the sleeves are as short as the width of the body of the sweater, if that comes out even, I'm done. If it doesn't, I'll continue the vertical rows until it's wide enough.

Then I'll make the other side of the sweater the same way, with a different order to the stipe pattern, sew them together...and I'm hoping it'll be beautiful. We'll see!