A blog entry full of sound and fury, signifying very little knitting

Stornaway sweater for BIL (blue)

Work has begun on the top back. Just a few rows, nothing exciting.

Herald tabard for moi

I forgot to mention in my previous post that the yellow wool arrived in the mail late last week. The vendor actually sent three different yellows, which was fantastic of him. Now I have to get myself a money order so I can pay him back.

I am a little nervous that he didn't send enough of each colour. I told him I didn't need more than 100g of the yellow and I think he misunderstood and sent me 100g in total. This means I'll have about 33g of each colour, which may not cut it. I haven't been able to tell for sure, though, because DD accidentally knocked over my postage scale last week and now it doesn't work properly. DH has an electronic postage scale, but it's in the basement and I haven't bothered to take the wool down there yet (besides, the scale never seems to be in the same place twice). But we'll see. Worst case scenario, I can always ask the vendor for more.

Romper for baby Marte

At last, at last, I can 'come out of the closet' about this project! Here's the story: about five years ago, I started participating in an online bulletin board community, mostly for women, where we discuss life, the universe, and everything. There is one woman in this online community who has been there since I started, who has been a real bedrock of the group. Super-nice, very with-it, intelligent, reasoned, helpful, terrific, the whole package. Unfortunately, she's also had years of fertility challenges. I mean, obstacle after obstacle was thrown in front of this poor lady to the point of ridiculousness. And then finally this spring, she announced that she was expecting a baby. Well. The entire board (myself included) went kooky-nutso-wild in celebration. :)

Naturally, I am designing and knitting her something. But I was so paranoid about not jinxing the pregnancy that I didn't really want to start the project or even blog about it until she was about 24 weeks along.

So today, I am delighted to say that my self-imposed 'jinx ban' is lifting and I am discussing the project. :) This pattern will be for my book, so I won't be taking pictures of progress or going into tremendous detail about what it looks like. However, I can say that I will be making a romper with some fair isle-esque pattern banding around the chest, and fair isle ribbing at pant and sleeve cuffs (maybe the neckline, too).

I'm almost all set to go. I have a romper of DD's that fit her very well when she was smaller, which I will be using for sizing reference. I have already designed the fair isle motif. The only thing I still need to do in order to start swatching is complete my purchase of all the yarn I want. Two trips to Zellers have failed to yield all the colours I need, so I will be doing another shopping expedition there (hopefully sometime this week) to see whether my luck gets any better.

The Schedule gives me five weeks to do everything. Stay tuned.

Larry's Cabled Cashmere Pullover for DH

Slightly more work was conducted (still in secret) on this project on Sunday afternoon - I got another inch done on the back. Should I have spent the time working on a more urgent project? You betcha. Do I feel guilt? Not much. Alpaca eases a multitude of sins.

Carnival Coat for DD

I didn't actually work on this, but I did spend some time looking at it and trying to figure out how I was going to make a buttonhole in the middle of perfectly solid knitting without losing my mind. I came up with a plan.

I'm going to graft the replacement stitches, buttonhole included, where they're supposed to go, and then I will cut away the original sections of knitting and weave in the cut-away ends so the whole sweater doesn't unravel. I have not yet discovered a reason why this would not work, but the great part about the plan is that it doesn't require me to make the commitment of slicing away bits of the sweater right at the beginning. Grafting first will allow me to figure out the 'lie of the land', as it were, and if I screw up doing that, I won't have damaged anything irreparably. I think it will work. I will try to remember to take pictures before, during and after.