The main topic of conversation for the past few days seems to be the heat. Bloggers all over are passing around ideas for keeping cool in the dawg days of summer. This morning, NPR projected that we'd hit the low 100s here in the Wild Wild West, but at 2 pm Weather Dot Com said it was 85 degrees. Heck, that's not so bad. Unless you're in the fields picking vegetables.
I hammered away at Pellew's Pelisse over the weekend and got it to the armhole shaping phase. Why was I so scared of sweaters? I'll ask that question again, if I can, when I've finished. What completely mystifies me is how other knitters can whip through a sweater -- even a complicated sweater -- in a matter of days. Most of these folks have day jobs, too (or evening or night jobs) so I just don't know how they do it. It would probably help if I was a size eentsy, which I've never been and will never be. I'd like to have this sweater finished about the middle of next month, which will give me time to make maybe one more before winter starts nosing around the West. I will say that this project feels like it's going quickly, even though some days I can't get around to doing more than a row or two on it. Tonight I carved out about six rows. See photo at top.
Over the weekend, I went through some of my patterns and magazines looking for other simple sweater-type projects that can fill holes in my wardrobe. I think I'm a combination of a process knitter (like to learn and apply new techniques or skills) and a project knitter (aiming toward a specific finished item). As my skill has developed, I find myself less interested in novelty yarns and find myself gravitating toward interesting colors in simpler traditional yarns, or becoming interested in the yarn's content and feel. I wear a lot of black, mostly because it's practical and it goes well with my skin tone, so nearly any color will pair nicely with existing sections of my wardrobe. That means that nearly anything I make will be useful.
I trolled the sale bins at the LYS on Saturday and noticed that they had a lovely pale soft antique pink superwash worsted weight, five balls of it, about 220 yards per ball. I could use a pink cardigan, so I'm thinking about that yarn. If it were a chunky weight, I'd already be knitting with it. The trick is to find a pattern that will only require as much yarn as I can pry out of the sale bin, because they're Yarns Brunswick brand and I gather from comments on the Web that the company is no longer doing business. Pellew's Pelisse is also being made from YB yarn, but I made double dog sure that I had enough.
While shopping, I remarked to A--, the amazing knitter that works at the LYS that I had two projects going. She exclaimed that she never has that few projects in progress! A-- is one of those people who cranks out projects quickly so she can do that. In my not-too-distant past I had a lot of irons in the fire like that, and am still catching up and finishing things that I started back in the Stone Age (that period before Grad School). One of the most embarassing is the cross-stitched nutcracker Christmas ornament I started in 1987. Okay, yeah, it's on tiny Aida fabric and is sixteen square inches of solid cross-stitching with miles of backstitching to outline the details and in the interim I've earned a master's, a doctorate, gotten married, and held about a gazillion full- and part-time jobs to stay afloat. Okay, so I got distracted. But now the only thing that's really standing in the way of it being finished is the last of the backstitching, sewing it into a tube, and stuffing it. I could do it in a couple of evenings, since The Emperor gifted me at Christmas with a lamp-magnifying glass combination so that I could see the darned thing in the first place since my eyes have taken the post-40 downhill slide. What I should do is to get it out right now and finish it.
So in my knitting life, I am trying to stay sensible and only start things I have every intention of seeing through in my lifetime. I'm trying to stick to having a sock on the needles and one sizeable project at once, and that's all. Although I will probably break that rule soon to start knitting wooly hats to send to Wooly Hat Week for the British and International Sailors Society. Everybody has a charity, and this is one of mine; it's a way to channel all of that Hornblower energy into something constructive. Speaking of the Forester novels, I've finished all of them but am saving two short stories about HH for later. I'm not quite ready for a world where there aren't any new Hornblower stories to read.
Now, I will go downstairs and dig out that nutcracker ornament and will try to post a photo of it tomorrow. I will be responsible to you and will report all progress until it is finished.
On edit: I got out the nutcracker ornament and in less than one hour, I finished the embroidery. Photo to appear in tomorrow's blog.
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