Needles & hooks

All done!

I finished it!

I wove in all the fair isle tails and sewed the sleeves seams and hems, and I had to stay up a little late to finish sewing up the hem* around the bottom. Then all I had left were the buttons. But it was late. So, determined to finish the sweater to wear to work, I got up and attached the buttons in the morning. I’m wearing it now. It’s nice and warm, and the fur collar doesn’t tickle me like I feared it would. But the collar has gotten a few comments. I’ll dig out the camera from the move and try to posts some pictures soon.

Didn’t get to start on the gauge swatch for the new sweater. I’ll work on that tonight and hopefully I won’t need smaller needles. I’m not confident though. Maybe I should just buy smaller ones anyway. I should call and see how late the knitting store is open today….

* The hems: rather than just starting with the cast-on row, this pattern called for an inch of Stockinette then a row of purl before starting the main section. That inch gets folded up later and sewn to the underside. I thought it was a little strange while I was working it, but it makes a very nice finished edge around the cuffs and bottom.

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Just the finishing

Over the last few days, moving has settled enough that I’ve been able to steal a little craft time and I finished the principal knitting on my sweater. I even ducked into a fabric store and bought the buttons. Last night I finished the fur collar and now I just have to do the finishing. Primarily, weaving in all the tails from the fair isle and then sewing up the sleeves. With any luck, I should get that done tonight so that I can wear my sweater tomorrow!

And while I still have a few holiday projects left to finish, I also stopped into the yarn store and bought the yarn for my next project. I had an honest reason for going into the store — I needed to buy large needles to do the fur collar. But I had picked two sweaters from the Winter Interweave Knits that I wanted to do for myself and I figured that while I was there, I should pick out the yarn and order it in the colors I wanted. Well, they had a perfect yarn for “Marcel’s Sweater” and they had enough burgundy in stock. Clearly, it was fate. We’re having Thanksgiving with friends and I think there will be plenty of TV time (we have to watch the South Park Thanksgiving episode and our friend just got the new Looney Tunes DVD), so I think I might just start on this new sweater (must remember to do gauge swatch tonight to see if I need more needles).

But sometime this weekend I’ll take some time to sit down and take stock of the projects I still have to finish and list out those I want to do next. There are two other sweaters in Knits that I want to do, and I’m tempted to take a stab at learning how to do gloves.

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Remember when I used to do crafts?!

Moving sucks.

All the things I like to do are packed away in boxes and stacked in random piles. I spend all my time packing or unpacking or cleaning or organizing and feel guilty when I just want to veg and knit.

The main move happened over the weekend. I took Friday off to be around when the phone/cable guy came and we spent most of that day taking car loads between places. The movers came and did the big stuff on Saturday morning, and the rest of the day was more car loads. And both Friday and Saturday were blisteringly cold with huge gusts of wind. My hands were chapped and raw throughout the weekend. So even though I sat down on Sunday and allowed myself to watch The Simpsons, my hands were in no shape to do anything fun. I spent the first part of the week slathering on hand cream at every opportunity and I’m finally back to feeling normal again.

Tonight I will attempt to find my sweater project and work on it during West Wing. That project was going well last time I saw it. I’d finished redoing the body and it and the sleeves are all squeezed onto my circular needle to work the shoulders. So many stitches, the rows take forever.

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No End in Sight

I finished the sleeves. And joyfully I took out the body that I’d finished weeks ago to notice 1) the sleeves end on a different pattern row from the body and 2) the body’s gauge is noticeably wrong.

I took a good look at the pattern and noticed that I had followed it faithfully, yet it was wrong for the sleeves. They end up with a purl row instead of a knit row as needed to match with the body. You may recall that I’d already had a few problems with this pattern, something I’ve noticed is a regular occurance with this designer. Fortunately, this was simply solved by ripping back the final three rows and redoing two on each sleeve. Not nearly so much a burden as…..

…..ripping out all the solid color on the body. Back when I finished the body I’d observed that the gauge of the main color section was a little too loose compared to the gauge for the fair isle section. As a result, the main color puckers and bulges a bit. As an experiment, I tried a smaller needle for the main color section on the sleeves and having completed those, saw that it was far better. So I ripped out 2 balls of yarn. Ack!

This all would be slightly less a pain if I had extra sets of circular needles in the working sizes. Then I wouldn’t have to keep transferring stitches around. At least the odd stretching on the body rows from being squeezed onto stitch holders that aren’t quite big enough is now gone. Which do you think is better — extra circulars or really big stitch holders?

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Two steps forward, three steps back

I’m never going to be finished with the fair isle section.

I thought I’d finished it, and I had just the one error — the diagonal stripes slanting the wrong direction. Then the other night I looked at it again and realized that they don’t all slant in the wrong direction. There’s a V half-way through. And because it’s fair isle, it’s two colors (black and lt. grey) and rather obvious. And I was 6.5 inches through the solid color section beyond the fair isle.

I knew that this would always bother me with this sweater if I didn’t fix it. So I ripped out the 6.5 inches. And I ripped out another inch of the fair isle. And I started over. I fixed it now and it looks right and I’m working my way back to where I was with on the other sleeve so I can work them together again. But it sucks.

Hopefully I can put this behind me for good now and finish the sweater. Because I just got the Winter 2003 issue of Interweave Knits and there are 2 sweaters I want to make in it. Not to mention those ornaments I have to get to.

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Frustration everywhere

I’ve spent my available stitching time in the last week working on the sweater for myself, the one with the fair isle sections at the bottom hem and at the cuffs. And it’s been painful. First I had to rip out many rows on the top section of one of the cuffs because I missed a solid color row. Then after I re-did it, I saw that the diagonal stitches go in the opposite direction from the other cuff and from the body. After having ripped out those stitches once already, I decided that it looked fine enough to keep. And I remembered the sage wisdom from a grandma figure about “personalizing” your work — she always made sure to change at least one stitch in her cross-stitch pieces in order to make the piece her own. After several years, I realized that this is a clever way to account for the small errors I am always bound to make.

So I finally finished the fair isle sections on both sleeves. I had feared that I would run out of one color before I was finished and I came darned close. I think I’ve only got enough left of that color to do about 4 more rows if I had to. Phew!

Then I started on the solid color portion of the sleeves. The pattern is pretty simple, k4 p6 on the rs rows, staggering the placement of the purl stitches so that they overlap in alternating rows. Except that I got 2 solid inches into it before I realized that I was repeating the pattern over 4 rows instead of over 8, so it was much more condensed than on the body. Grrr. More ripping out.

Fortunately, I have a lot of good TV to keep me company with this project this month and Amazon just sent me the 6th season of DS9 on DVD, so there’s stuff even when there’s no TV. That will keep me going during these frustrating sleeves.

However, I’m moving to a new apartment this month, so I won’t have much time for crafts. I fear that once again I may be finishing my x-mas ornaments as I’m packing off presents.

Thank you to Barbara and Anna who have left me comments with links to craft charities.

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