A Knotty Situation

I'm playing with some Noro yarn right now for an upcoming design. It's a yarn knitters either love or hate. Many object to the knots which occasionally turn up. I don't think there are many more knots than most yarns. I think the bigger issue is that the knots break the sequence of the colourway. 

I rewound each ball onto my ball winder keeping my fingers on the yarn so I could break it whenever I found a knot. I do this with almost all yarn I use which is in balls for this reason. When I don't, I'm always sorry when a knot shows up close to the end of a row and I have to go backwards. 

I didn't think to count before hand but most of my balls (seven out of ten ?) did not contain knots. I didn't find more than one knot in any of the balls. I had decided I would start my pieces in the same spot on the colour way. The balls never start at the same point so I rewound several balls slowly and wrote down the sequence. I got two slightly different sequences and one ball that completely skipped over several colours. I did have a customer when I worked in my LYS who was a Noro fan and she told me she occasionally found balls in reverse sequence. She also said she had given up on following the colour sequence because it was just too much trouble. I realized after playing around with the complete balls that while they mainly follow a sequence it isn't always exactly the same. 

I spent a little time in the Nuts for Noro Ravelry group. There are a few knitters there who spend time making the sequences match but as some point out, it can be next to impossible unless you are working in the round. I found posts about colour runs in longer and shorter lengths and balls which just skip some colours completely. 

I think I may just go Zen here, it is what it is and let it happen and not worry about how the colours align. It's more of a surprise that way and in the end they are all going to repeat somewhere in the garment.