Finally Some Knitting Progress

If you can believe it, I haven't bought any yarn in the past 48 hours. Not that I wasn't tempted, mind you. I stumbled upon a 60% off sale for Wool Cotton, possibly my favorite yarn, but so far, I haven't succombed. Also, WEBS is having an anniversary sale. I have, however, finished the sleeves on Sam, FINALLY. The front and back took me about a week and the sleeves took me over a month. Go figure. I guess I lost momentum on the project. But alas, here it is, all pinned together, but as of yet, unseamed. With this project, I made a mistake that I often make, which is thinking I'm smarter or more clever than the pattern designer. After all, what do they know? They only do this for a living, while I've been knitting for a whopping year and a half?! Anyway, when I was getting ready to bind off the back, I looked at the instructions and thought, why should I bind off when I need to immediately pick up these same stitches to knit the collar? Couldn't I just leave the stitches on a holder? So, I did. However, the bind off row would have made a very convenient place for me to stitch down the collar when I folded it in half. I don't have this bind off row, so I can't see where the collar is supposed to be seamed nor do I have a nice little sturdy row to use for seaming the castoff row of my collar. So, here's what I'm thinking...I think this is going to be a shawl-collared sweater. What do you think? I actually think it looks lovely this way, and I've always wanted a shawl collared sweater. So I guess we can call my Little Miss Smartypants pattern modification a design element. That being said, I should, yet again, learn the lesson that I don't know everything about everything and sometimes I should either think things through or, alternatively, trust the designer.

Moving on to Starsky, I've done a cable swatch of the cables I'm going with. The ones I posted on Wednesday, unfortunately, had no hope of meshing with 3 X 3 ribbing, or any kind of ribbing really. So, I sadly had to toss them aside and come up with something else. I think I've come up with something I really like. For my center cable, I'm using something called Ensign's Braid from Barbara Walkers Second Treasury of Knitting Patterns. For my side cables, I did some hemming and hawing, as you can see from my swatch, but I think I'm going to go with the cable from the brim of Coronet. I have swatched that cable both in Polar and in Pleasure to see which one I liked better. I'm really disappointed how dark the Pleasure is, so I may decide to go with Polar, despite it's drawbacks. I REALLY want to be able to see my cables. So, I'll be knitting a heavy, very warm, slightly itchy, but lovely sweater. I'm still working on a Polar swatch, so I'm going to post a comparison of Polar and Pleasure swatches later today. I think most of the decisions on this sweater have been made and I'm ready to start!