Jon's Knit Blog

A Sleeve Grows in Midtown

Well, almost Midtown, at any rate. And at least the sleeve is growing. I think I got a full pattern repeat in today, which isn't shabby, because also I spent a decent amount of time working on my Kersti scarf. Have I showed you the Kersti scarf?

Anyhow, we're going to have yarn crises on both these projects. I think that I stupidly only bought two skeins on the Kersti in question. This probably means I should frog the scarf as it really needs three skeins, and who knows where I'll find more of it (unless someone out there reading this has some K305 V22 out there... it's purple and black, mostly). I'm also seriously not going to have enough of the Filatura di Crosa Primo I'm using for the blue cable sweater. It's color 291, dye lot 40, if anybody has some. I think I'll have better luck finding a very close dye lot match on the Primo, a solid royal blue yarn, than on the Kersti... but who knows. Maybe the knitting gods will smile upon me.

With my luck, though? I'll have to figure out some other solution...

Regardless of the yarn supply solution, I'm feeling very good about the blue cables. I actually am working the sleeve with absolutely no clue where the pattern book is (well, ok, it's on the nightstand in the bedroom, but that's about as far from knitting space as you can be in my apartment...). So I'm knitting without any sort of "pattern" in front of me, although I do have a graph on which I keep track of rows and increases, and I already marked off which rows will not get increases so that it matches the other sleeve. But I'm very proud of how I've learned the cable pattern. When I did the back and the first sleeve, I used stitch markers to separate each pattern repeat. And now, I am just paying attention to the actual cables, looking at what goes where. And I have figured out the difference between the C3B and the C3F's... so I hopefully will not have another misplaced cable... knock wood. It's actually rather exciting, to figure out the difference between front and back cables.

This reminds me of the epiphany you reach, rather earlier on in knitting, where you can look at a stitch, any stitch, that you've just made, and the first time you can realize that you can see the difference between a knit stitch and a purl stitch. Well, at least it took me a decent amount of time to be able to figure that out. And I'm continually getting faster. So while there's no chance that this sweater can be finished for the Christmas gift I had once hoped for, there's still a decent chance of it being finished sometime this millenium... Well, I have a back, a sleeve, and over 1/4 of another sleeve... so only 110 rows left on the sleeve and the front is about 176 rows, which means there's still a hell of a lot of sweater left to knit.

Posted by Jon at December 2, 2004 05:37 AM