Mossy Cottage Knits

Ice? What Ice?

The annoying vagaries of Seattle weather: Early this morning the skies were gray and threatening, the temperature was below freezing, and the roads were so icy and slick I had to cut my commute short and head home after a scant mile of driving. Two hours later, the skies were bright with joyful sunshine, the temperature was in the mid-forties and the roads were dry and bare. Yes, Mother Nature is blowing us a large cosmic raspberry here in the Great Northwest.

So, I am indeed at work but since I got here late, just a quick post.

Over the holidays I continued working on The World’s Largest Sweater. Thanks to some technical advice and nudging from Kit at the last Soiree, I was able to figure out the number of stitches for the neck for the back, finish same, and get it off the needles. (Thanks, Kit! Smooches!) Then I moved right on to the first sleeve and decided to throw in a 6-stitch cable fer grins. However, about a quarter of the way through the sleeve, my Denise cable and needles became fiercely uncooperative and started coming apart once, if not twice, nay, thrice, every row, despite the emergency application of tiny pieces of double-sided tape to the connector area. It finally got to the point where I was spending more time putting the stitches back on the needles and reconnecting the needle and cable than I was knitting. (On the bright side, with such bulky yarn, if any of your stitches do make a break for freedom, there’s none of that fussing and fighting with a crochet hook. You just haul up the current loop, cram both your thumb and index finger through the middle, and yank the errant loop back where it belongs. Repeat as needed.) Although I know I can easily order a new Denise cable, I was too excited about finishing the sleeve to wait, so I bought a new Crystal Palace circular needle. Why the excitement? Because the impossible has happened—I’m knitting to gauge and to size! Despite my inexperience and despite my fiddling endlessly with the pattern by throwing in the cable, adding some stitches for size and then arbitrarily adding a few more to compensate for the pulling in of the cable, I am the proud mama of an 18” wide sleeve, just as the pattern requires!

Here, a picture of the sleeve about half-way through the increases. I’m lovin’ the cable since it looks casual but tailored. I’m toying with the idea of putting a cable down the front as well because the thought of all of that plain stockinette yardage bores me stupid but I’m not sure about the large-boob-bulky-cable look. (Note to self: Try draping sleeve over frontage to see effect. Keep laughing to a minimum or effect will be lost due to massive and irregular frontage movement.)