Rain Check

I finished NaKniSweMoDo Sweater #3 over the weekend.  I had less trouble working with heavy wool than usual because the last several weeks have been cool and rainy—so rainy that I can’t remember the last full day of sunshine.   Ordinarily, I don’t welcome the start of summer, but even I have had enough of the gloom.  (According to the weather forecasters, it is already our 7^th wettest June on record—and more rain is ahead for most of this week.)  Ed is swearing that we won’t see the sun until November, and I have stopped trying to cheer him up.  Although cool, it is clammy and damp.  Armies of slugs have invaded my garden, and if my tomato plants could talk, they would implore me to move them back inside.  My summer vegetables are off to a very slow start. 

And despite the coolness, it is not really cold enough to model the sweater.  And I’m not about to go tromping around outside in the damp, unmowed grass to find a place where I can take a nice photo.  So I’ll take a rain check on the modeling shot and store this sweater for the summer.  Here, instead, is my fallback picture on a hanger and ladder:

The sweater is my adaptation of a more traditional Morehouse Farms design.  I changed the ribbing at the cuffs, bottom, and neck edge to reverse stockinette, instead of ribbing.  I replaced the drop shoulders with fitted sleeves.  Also, I shaped the sides a bit, and I added some slits at the side seams.  I designed this sweater to wear when working, and it succeeds on that score.  

If I had it to do over again, I’d probably make the back neck edge a bit higher, but I used the pattern motif as a guide to start the neck bindoff.  The bindoff begins at the end of a check.  Because this yarn is thick, I used mattress stitch for the seams instead of crocheting them, and I did feel the sense of inertia that seems to afflict many knitters when faced with finishing.  I guess I would have done better to knit in the round until the armholes, and for the sleeves.  But what’s done is done.

I used about 9 of the 11 skeins in the kit (it was cheaper to buy the kit than loose skeins), and I have already stored the excess in my box of “Morehouse leftovers”, which is a great place to look for small amounts for presents.  The remainder will be used for hats or mittens.

To both the trained and untrained eye, it looks as if I won’t manage 12 sweaters by the end of December.  I had hoped to surpass my personal best of a sweater from scratch in two months, and I’m only doing slightly better than that.  But the next project (Sweater #4), which I think will be Thora, is moving along nicely.  If I could finish it by the end of July, I’d still have a chance at 8, or even 9, sweaters for the year—and I’d be happy with that.

 

Comments

[Caroline M]

It is a lovely colour but just looking at it is making me hot. We're either heading for a thunderstorm or I'm going to melt, or both. I particularly like the edges, hem, cuffs and neck. They are in tune with the pattern rather than being something obtrusive at the edge.

[Jenny]

I feel for you, having to knit with gray yarn in this awful weather. It was only 74 degrees in our house yesterday, but I begged Joe to turn the central air on, just to get the moisture out of the air (and the bed, and the clothes, and the walls, and the furniture). I had to put on a fleece jogging suit so I wouldn't freeze to death, but at least my nightgown was dry when I went to put it on last night. It has been clammy for two weeks now! Beautiful sweater; I'm a big sucker for basket weave!

[tiennie]

This is fantastic! I bet it will be wonderful in winter.

[Robin]

It turned out great! I don't blame you for not wanting to put it on and model it - I have a few things like that, that will be modeled once fall hits.