Ruthless Knitting

I finished up Frances over the long weekend. I didn’t think the last bits would go so quickly, but somehow I managed to fit in quite a bit of knitting while also cleaning and painting the garage floor with David, mountain biking, cleaning all the floors in the house, doing the touch-up painting in the basement, going to the farmer’s market with David on our bikes, and so on.

Once I finished the knitting, it took me three days to get all the ends woven in. Two ends per stripe x lots of stripes = eleventy million ends. But this morning I managed to finish them and to get the sweater blocked. I’m a little worried about how much it grew in blocking — not from the yarn blooming but just from the weight of the wet yarn, despite how careful I was not to let it stretch out. I wanted some growth in most of the dimensions so that the sweater would be a bit looser-fitting, and that seems to have worked out, but I didn’t count on so much growth in the sleeve length. I may have to rip out the last stripe on each sleeve and create a new hem one stripe earlier. We shall see. Meanwhile, here’s a peek at what Frances looked like prior to blocking:

With that finished, I’ve been swatching the yarn I got in Vermont for what might be my next project. I had a plan for this yarn, but once I saw how it knit up, I changed it. Now I’m considering a cardigan with a stripey, textured front and back (as shown in the stripey, textured swatch) and plain purple sleeves, with ribbed bands. Whether I’ll begin that soon or work on swatches for another sweater has not yet been revealed to me.

Oh, and I finally got around yesterday to adding a baby picture to my random things post. In case you missed it, here I am in my two-year-old glory:

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 5th, 2007 at 7:46 am and is filed under 2007 Collection, Design, Projects in Progress, Swatch-o-Rama. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.