My Designer Puzzle

I haven't thrown away my red yoke yet and I did wake up early several mornings knowing what to do next. BEWARE this is a long post. It's been a long week. I'm not despairing, just wrestling with a puzzle.

The first morning's thought was to change from fingering weight yarn to DK weight yarn. And so I did. I got the yoke done and it was a breeze. I'm calling this Lightening.

I did sort of, maybe, think that there was a sticky problem somewhere. Not to be held up though, since I was having such a lovely time, I worked the Divide (putting sleeve stitches on spare yarn) and continued down the body. The whole time that niggling little voice was wondering how The Knitter (that's you) was going to work the Divide and then continue to knit the lightening bolt down the Front & Back. It's a small thing but it seems to hinge on where I put the Beginning of Round marker and how I explained how to work the Lightening Bolt itself. When I started to write the Divide Round out I ran into trouble. I couldn't go on. I ripped back to the Divide Round, put it aside and went to bed.

Here's the problem. I have a good idea of how I want this design to work and I know exactly where I am as I'm knitting. Good thing, right? I knit my Lightening Bolts with the Markers in the centre of each one. Then I wrote it out in the pattern: work starting from this marker to that marker and repeat. That makes sense, right? Work from one pink marker to the next pink marker.

Then I realized that I was not knitting from marker to marker at all. What I was actually doing was knitting toward the Marker and then deciding which side of the Marker to work the increase on. AH, HA. That was a big moment.

Charting helps me think things through so with paper and pencil I created a chart. Imagine the Marker is right on the centre line of the chart. Increase holes are worked on the right of the Marker and then on the left and then again on the right, etc.

Unfortunately that chart does not show how the lightening bolt is going to shift from side to side as they are knit.

Would this make more sense? It's a good visual. Again, marker set in the middle of the lightening bolt.

But then it's not clear that the stitches (B's on the chart) of the lightening bolt itself line up above each other. AARRGGH.
More thought needed. Maybe tomorrow morning will do it. Maybe I'll be struck by lightening and my brain will fire at an accelerated rate and then I will know.
Deb