And all that Jazz!

Hello! Jazz is a standard poodle who belongs to my good friend, Karen. When she was visiting us in this chaparral-clad canyon last spring, we decided that Jazz (still a pup and starting to look like a tribble) should have his first haircut. He was picking up stickers all over the place! We bought clippers and went to work on him. In a moment of temporary insanity, I suggested that we save the clippings, have them spun, and I would knit her a lace scarf. She went home with two grocery bags of clippings - one mostly long, the other medium to short - and I forgot all about it until a package arrived in February containing 7.2 oz of handspun poodle in 3 small skeins. The yarn appears to be mostly approx. 13 wpi or Sport to DK weight - yardage is as yet unknown. I have charted a pattern 83 stitches wide, composed of Wings of the Swan with compatible twisted open cables, and am now faced with a dilemma: do I plunge right in with a provisional cast-on, work a few inches, then pick up and knit in the opposite direction, and continue both ends in tandem until I run out of yarn? Or, shall I swatch first in a similar weight alpaca, to work out the detail of patterning for two pairs of wings departing in opposite directions from the center back? The drape of the alpaca will not be even remotely similar, but I fear that the poodle may not respond well to frogging. So, here I sit, mired in indecision.