elizabeth_mn

I just bound off the last stitch of the Retrograde and wove in all the ends.  It's done.

I feel kind of dazed.  It would not be an exaggeration to say this sweater has been a bit of an obsession for me for the past several months, and I am having a hard time believing it's finished.

I have 3 partial skeins left, totaling exactly 50 grams, the size of a full skein.  Which means I could have gotten away with using 1 less skein, but I'd have had more ends to weave.  Since the sweater is meant to be reversible, I tried to avoid any extra yarn ends.

I think I will wait until Monday to block it so that my HB will be at work and therefore not ruin the surprise, if it still is a surprise (I hope it is!). 

I got bored of knitting the sweater body and started on the sleeves.



I'm knitting in scrap yarn on each decrease row so I don't have to take notes or count to make each sleeve the same.  Yay laziness!

I almost ran out of yarn, so I wanted to make the join of a possible new dye lot in the same place on each sleeve.  Of 3 skeins, I knitted one on one sleeve and then put the stitches on a holder and started the other sleeve.

Good news: When I ordered 3 more skeins from KnitPicks, I requested the dye lot I already had and they had it and sent it to me! I was worried for a few days that the new yarn wouldn’t match.

Well, when I thought everybody was well, I was wrong.  HB's cold stuck around for another week.  Now, finally, everyone in the house is actually well (maybe?).

I cut the bias strips for all the coasters; I'm making them from coiled, fabric-wrapped clothesline like these baskets.  I got 1/2 yard each of 3 fabrics in the same print, different colors.  I made a few coasters in the first color, but when I switched fabrics, I saw I had cut the strips in the wrong direction, so instead of a little swirl of short stripes, I got long, non-swirly stripes going down the length of the rope.  Not pretty.  So I'm putting the wrong-cut ones away for something else and just using the one color to make more coasters.

I spent a little time on them when HB was hanging out with the girl, and I also plopped the girl in her playpen and wheeled it over to the sewing room to work on them one day when I was feeling particularly bored with stack-up-blocks-and-knock-them-over games.

I also pulled out my Retrograde sweater and began the last cable round.  I put it away when F figured out how to climb on the couch on her own a few weeks ago, because I figured she would get into the basket and unravel it.  But now that the yoke's almost done, I can consider it a TV knitting project and maybe I will put more time into it.  Annual Gift Day is going to come faster than I probably realize.

I started my next sweater, Retrograde, last week and I am now about 1.25 balls of yarn (of 11) into it.  It's a top-down round-yoke pullover and it has some interesting cabling which I am enjoying.

The sweater is designed to be reversible, so I am trying to hide my ends neatly.  The yarn is a superwash, so spit-splicing wouldn't work (and I have never had much luck doing that anyway).  When I joined the second ball of yarn, I made a Russain join, but it was hard to make it hold and the very ends made little tufts anyway.  But it was the best I could do, and a few rows later, I went back and sewed down the tiny tufts with a single ply of the yarn (it has 4 plies) that I pulled from a scrap end. It looks almost invisible, certainly better than leaving it alone, and now I plan to sew down the ends on all the upcoming joins with a single ply.

I've also been working on my applique pieces.  I've almost finalized the layout of the tree piece and I have put a couple hours of stitching into the urn piece.  I fused the shapes with paper-backed adhesive web and I am stitching them down with little stitches and all-purpose sewing thread.  Then I'm outlining the shapes with matching pearl cotton in a backstitch.  So far it is looking really nice.