Swatching for the Crazies

A few people in my local knitting group recently started talking about the Nightingale pattern. (I highly encourage you to look at that Ravelry pattern link before you read further.)

They even went so far as to plan a knit-along for it. I love the socks, I think they look amazing. I also think it's a sort of insane kind of crazy to undertake that project. Then I went looking for something in my sock yarn stash and found some yarn. Yarn that would be perfect for it.

Yes, that's right, I have joined the club crazy. Our knit-along is set to start on Sunday and we will have a gathering on Monday as our "official" kick-off since too many people have plans on Sunday. In order to be ready, I purchased the pattern, cleared off needles and today, I took these two yarns,

and I knit a swatch.

These are stranded colorwork socks with charts and so I think gauge is going to be really important. Otherwise I would take my normal just go for it and see what happens approach to my knitting.

I even knit the swatch in the round to make sure it was as accurate as possible. But, I need your help. I need to decide which color is the foreground and which is the background. In order to get a good picture of that, I knit a small portion of a chart on my swatch. One side with the white as the background (that's just part of a bird tail and some leaves, I couldn't bring myself to knit the whole bird)


One side with the Purple as the background.

I am planning to use magic loop for these to keep the sides together and hopefully make the colorwork easier. The pattern calls for size 2.50mm needles (sometimes called US Size 1.5) and I used my 2.5mm Addi Turbo needles to knit the swatch.

I think I already know what I like but I want more opinions. I won't be getting together with the knitting group until Monday and I want to start right away on Sunday (if possible) so I need to make a decision.

Note: this swatch is still wet from washing so the colors are a little more accurate in the ball but you can get a pretty good picture. I also won't know for sure about gauge until it's dry and I can measure it.

Here's where you come in. Leave me a comment. Tell me which you think is better, white background or purple background. I'm not going to tell you what I think until I get your opinion.