Although I enjoy knitting at the end of the day, there are definite drawbacks to settling down after dinner to veg out and focus on the intricacies of a pattern or the tactile pleasure of a beautiful yarn. To knit after a day of work and a vigorous session at the gym, where I’ve typically had a 60-lap swim or an exercise class, I have to be on automatic pilot. That is, I have to know what I’m going to knit and how I’m going to knit it. So if I have a problem or I’m ready to try something new, the project tends to hover in unfinished status.
Since it is New Year’s Day, and resolutions are in order, I will add finishing these unfortunate orphans to the usual resolutions that start my year. [Reading every issue of the New Yorker magazine when it arrives each week has been a resolution for at least 20 years, and I have an attic full of them, so you can see how successful I am at fulfilling these goals.] I’m hoping that posting these pictures here and committing to finishing them for all to see will light a fire under me.
So here they are:
The oldest of the bunch is this Rowan sweater. I’m up to the shawl collar, and finishing it will help me design the collar I want to construct for the sweater I’m making for the Manly Gift Along KAL, my first KAL. I think this one has been in limbo for about four years, and it was intended to get me started with intarsia so I could tackle the many other Rowan kits I bought in the mid-1980s (and inherited from my mother, who bought them and didn’t knit them).
Despite the age of the Rowan sweater, I think this brown one will be the first I attempt to finish. The pattern is from IK, Fall 1997, a design by Nancy Bush. The yarn is Rowan’s Magpie, which I intended to use for something else. Some years ago, I knitted the “matching” hat to this sweater using different yarn for two small presents. The hat is a fun knit, and the sweater was too—until this point. The sweater would be great to wear while I work in my loft-office. If it ever gets cold this winter, the loft will become drafty. The reason this is unfinished is that I wanted to try a new type of buttonhole (for me), and I need to do this during the day, when I’m fresh. I already tried the buttonbands, but in a moment of hubris I actually thought I knew more than Nancy Bush, and I knitted the neck ribbing first. When I attached the first buttonband it looked awful, and so I ripped it out. Nancy is definitely right—buttonbands first, and then the neck.
This next sweater is an adaptation of the sweater pictured from Knitters, Fall 2000. It is yarn I bought at Rhinebeck only about two years ago, from Ellen’s Half-Pint Farm. I loved the yarn, which is a merino-silk mix, but I wondered if it was too tight. After reading Eunny’s blog for some months and looking at her form-fitting sweaters, I reevaluated this one. But I do need to plan the back because this yarn is quite different from the original. It will probably be #3 in order.
When it reached 100°F this past summer, I had been working on the brown sweater and I couldn’t bear even thinking about knitting with wool. I always had this Calvin Klein sweater in the back of my mind (Vogue Knitting, Spring/Summer 1990), and I thought that Brown Sheep’s Cotton Fleece (again bought for another project that has since been rejected) would work well. And it did—for the body. But I was careless in assuming the sleeves would just follow the body adjustment, and they did not. They have fewer cables, and they ended up with a diameter that would fit an elephant’s leg. I thought I’d save this one for finishing over the summer—then we might have unseasonably cool weather, since I’m ready this year to switch from wool to cotton.
So ladies and gentlemen, let the resolutions begin.
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