One of my knitting goals for 2023 was to learn ladderback jacquard for catching long floats in stranded colorwork - I love more spaced out graphic designs rather than fair isle type designs, but it can be tough to catch the long floats the traditional way without having them show through to the RS. I really wanted to make a sweater with a tarot card on it and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to learn! Turns out I LOVE ladderback jacquard and I think I’ll use it a ton in the future. The only difficulty I had was that sometimes I would mistake one of the LBJ columns for a real stitch and get confused on my stitch counts / where I was in the chart or accidentally work it as a normal stitch, but one of my test knitters suggested purling the LBJ columns on the RS and knitting them on the WS, so that way you can always tell them apart from the rest of the stitches. I did that the next time I used LBJ and while it was slightly fussier to work up, it was way easier to tell them apart and I never had any mix-ups, so I highly recommend that for more complex charts.
Also more generally, this sweater was a really lovely meaningful project for me! I chose The Star card because it represents hope, inspiration, renewal, opportunity, and light at the end of darkness. I was going through a hard time when I cast it on, and while knitting has always been a help to my mental health, I think it was especially helpful to spend all this meditative time working on something representing having hope for a brighter future. I really love how personal and meaningful making your own clothing can be, and I feel like I have my own talisman I can wear when I need to remind myself to hold onto hope