Finally finished my stag beetle colorwork sweater and I'm kind of obsessed with it

I designed a moth cardigan two winters back and your swatch advice brought back some painful memories. I did my gauge swatch in stockinette and called it good, then knit the whole yoke with my actual moth motif and the fabric came out stiff as a board. The floats were pulling everything in. Had to rip back about six inches of work and go up a needle size for the colorwork sections only. Now I always knit the real motif, in the round, before committing to anything.

For the steeking, I sewed two lines of machine zigzag down the sides of my steek panel before cutting, mostly because my hands were shaking too much to trust myself with just crochet reinforcement. It felt like cheating but it held up fine through a whole year of wear and washing. Mine had moths instead of beetles but same energy. I put mine near the cuffs so they peek out when I push my sleeves up. People at my knitting group kept thinking I'd bought it, which was the best compliment I've ever gotten. The wonky float tension thing is real too, mine has a couple spots on the left sleeve where the cream bunches weird and I've just decided that's the charm.

I'm the opposite about motifs, I cheat and do them as duplicate stitch after the knitting is done. Tried real colorwork on a pair of socks once and the floats on the wrong side made the fabric scratchy and bulky, and I have picky feet. Now I knit the whole thing plain in a nice soft merino and stitch the bugs on top with a tapestry needle afterward. My last project was a hat with three little bees on the crown and it took maybe two evenings of embroidery while watching TV. You can even go back and fix or move a bug if the placement bugs you, which is not an option once you've knit it in. Downside is it's flat looking compared to actual colorwork, no halo of color bleeding into the background like your beetles will have. Yours look like they grew out of the wool. Mine look a bit like stickers.

Also I could never bring myself to cut my knitting, steeking sounds like sorcery to me. Sewing two lines of machine stitches down each side and then going in with scissors anyway, my heart rate went up just reading that part. The flower and pine tree border sounds lovely, especially the trees at the hem, that's a nice place for a little detail most people won't notice right away but then they do.

This thread is making me want to try my first real colorwork project. I mostly quilt, and I keep thinking a simple nine-patch block would translate into a chart pretty easily, but I've never actually designed anything for yarn. The beetle antennae thing resonates though, I redrew a applique template for a bumblebee quilt like five times before the wings stopped looking like leaves. When you were drafting the chart, did you start on paper or go straight to a spreadsheet kind of thing? I have no idea what people normally use.

Forty-some years of knitting and I still remember my first cut steek, done the old Shetland way with just a line of hand whipstitch and a deep breath. You get faster at trusting the wool after the second or third one. One thing I'd add on the antennae front, chart them as single twisted stitches instead of full crosses if you ever revise the pattern. Half the beetle charts I've drawn over the years looked wonky until I shaved a stitch off the feelers. And wear the thing to the grocery store, house mirrors are only the beggining.