The sweater of doom!

I thought I had finally conquered the issues with the cabled panels on Bruce's Sweater (Terry's Pullover) that I have been working on for an eternity. (November 9, 2009). Ok, so it only FEELS like an eternity.

I ripped, reknitted, discovered that it still wasn't right, ripped, reknitted (repeat x5).

On Saturday I sat down on the subway (apparently, this is where I concentrate the best, go figure) and recharted the entire cabled section by hand on graph paper, with only a little interference from Georgia. I would put a picture of it up here and all, but unfortunately, it would go against a copyright or something, and I don't wanna do that.

The re-charting worked. I had a lovely visual of how the entirety of the cabled section looked, and I put in helpful directional arrows reminding me which way I should be reading the chart on any given side.

Of course, now I've discovered that I have about 60 too many stitches left on my needles at the end of the cabled section (oops) and am scrambling a little madly to reduce the number of stitches as fast as I can before it's time to shut this thing down.

Also, it looks like I'm going to have enough yarn to finish the sweater. Phew.

Here are some crappy pictures taken at night:

The weekend report

News items:

1. Washed and blocked the Featherweight Cardigan, with the help of the cat and the kid. Managed to not get a single photo of it after it came off the blocking board. Smart, I know.

2. Took my Borders rewards AND a coupon, went to Borders at Columbus Circle and got these two books:

The first book is the precursor to Knitters Book of Wool, which I bought and love. I have many questions about yarn after reading the book of wool, so hopefully this will answer most of them.

3. From Continuous Cables, I learned why my ribbing got so crappy over the last year, and a quick little technique for fixing it. When I first started knitting I was doing so combination style, purling English and knitting Continental. When you're knitting ribbing, or cabling, a good way to keep your leftmost stitch on either the rib or the cable from being sloppy and loose is to knit through the back loop and then untwist the stitch when you're purling back through that section. Which is exactly what I was doing when I was knitting combination style.

Now that I'm knitting in fully English style, I'm having problems. Go figure.

4. I spent a goodly amount of time knitting here yesterday:

We needed sunshine, warmth and greenery, so we headed over to the New York Botanical Gardens (i.e. our backyard) and just sat in the sunshine in the conservatory (glass house) in the lovely 75 degree interior. That is also perfectly humid, which was totally necessary for our poor sinuses.

5. After trying to knit on Bruce's sweater again and failing, I finally just re-charted the entire cable section so that I could look at the entire pattern visually, and put in helpful directional arrows and stuff. This worked! I'm now almost to the top of the sweater, which is awesome.

There are a few other items (like my homework from the sweater design class and a couple of yarn/pattern disastrous match-ups) but I'll save those for another post.

All in all, a busy and productive weekend.

Off to work...

The good news

First bit of good news: I finished Ella's sweater (this would be the Featherweight Cardigan). YAY! So excited about this. I blocked it last night. Here is a photo from in-progress blocking:


As you can see, Georgia is helping. And the colors really didn't show up very well at all. That's what I get for trying to take pictures at night.

Second bit of good news: I am considerably smaller than I had originally estimated in terms of bust measurement. So I'm either losing weight or I was overestimating how big I was. My Liesl is a bit too big for me (by about 6 inches in the bust). Heh. It truly is the sweater of doom!

Third bit of good news: Finished unpicking back to the point where I made a mistake on Bruce's Sweater. Providing I can actually concentrate on it this time around, it should be relatively smooth sailing.

Concentrate is the operative word in that sentence.

Let the mad casting on for new projects begin!

Also, a totally knitting unrelated story:

Georgia has been getting a little bit of eczema on her face, so I've been putting some cream on her at night to help.

Last night I walked into the bathroom to help her brush her teeth and her face was very shiny. So I said, "Did you put some cream on your face already?" and she replied "No, it's pudding," as if it were the most obvious thing in the whole entire world.

Yep. That's my kid.

The Second Sweater

The sweater that I forgot about yesterday (even though I had it knocking around somewheres in my little brain) was Ingenue by Wendy Bernard. She blogs over at Knit & Tonic (love the name of her blog!). Here's a pic, courtesy of her project page on Ravelry. It's from her book Custom Knits.


I like the Audrey Hepburn-esque look of this sweater. I haven't decided what yarn I want to use for this one, so if anybody has any suggestions, I'm open!

And another...

I've decided that in addition to Coraline, I'm going to knit two other sweaters. Because I'm crazy like that, yo.




First up will be Francis Revisted by Beth Silverstein.



(Picture courstey of Ms. Silverstein's pattern page)

I really want a cowl necked sweater, and I love the seed stitch detailing on this one. It's pretty fancy. I think I'm going to knit it in Cascade 220 in a cream color. I'm envisioning it under my burgundy red velvet blazer during the fall with some jeans and my awesome tan Frye boots. (thank you Bruce!)

And since I've started writing this post, I've completely forgotten what the second sweater was, so I'll have to post about that another time.

I've also come up with a way to work on Bruce's sweater on the subway. The thing that's been stopping me is that it's so heavy I haven't been able to support it while on the subway, and it was killing my hands and wrists. So I came up with a plan to get past that little issue, and will implement it as soon as I'm done with Ella's sweater.

I'm burning up...

I am burning through my WIPs, lemme tell ya.

Ella's Featherweight Cardigan is almost done. I picked up all the stitches for one sleeve last night, and I'm about halfway through with it already! Woo! I think it'll take me three more subway rides to completely finish that sucker up.

(again, major problems with the whole daylight thing for photos. I'll see if I can get a decent one tonight, but it's doubtful)

And isn't it entertaining that I can now measure my progress on a project in terms of subway rides? They're about 45 minutes long. So 90 minutes a day...

I've ripped out one row of Bruce's sweater and have one more to go until I reach the mistake. Once I've done that, it should be relatively smooth sailing. Although, honestly, I knitted that section so tightly I'm not sure how long it will take me to rip back.

Next up: Coraline

Here's a pic, courtesy of Ysolda's site:

I'm going to do mine in Drops Alpaca in a lovely raspberry pink color. And yes, it will be for me, damnit.

I am an FO machine!

Well, I finished my scarf yesterday afternoon, and I'm pleased to tell you that it can definitely handle weather colder than 20 degrees F. My neck was nice and toasty warm.

So, that's three FOs (Finished Object, Janey) for January! The Liesl, the Citron and my scarf. Whatever I'm going to call it.

I'm also making great progress on Ella's sweater (which is the featherweight cardigan) and will likely be done with that in the next few days.

I really don't feel like dealing with DPNs (Double Pointed Needles, J.) for the sleeves so I'm probably going to either teach myself magic loop or go up to Purl Soho on my lunch break and pick up some short circular Addis.

And I realized today that my entire collection of needles is a gigantic mess, so I need to do some organizing pretty quickly here.

I'm rethinking my friend's Phyllotaxis. I don't think the yarn I'm using is quite the correct one for him, so I'll probably frog what I have thus far, rewind the yarn and try another one. He did mention that he'd like something machine washable, so maybe some Berocco Vintage?

Any other ideas for some nice soft machine washable yarn suitable for a scarf?