On your mark, get set...

On Saturday, I finished the back of Juli's cardigan, and today I started the left front panel. Lopi works up so quickly in a single color, but even the charted work goes quickly when you're only working half the width of the sweater. I only got through a few charted rows before I had to stop. Monday will be devoted to house renovations, Tuesday to cleaning house, and Wednesday to working on my cabled sweater. I haven't even been keeping up with my one square a day addition to my afghan, so only marginal progress has been made there. (read: one square)



It's almost the end of the month! Only a few weeks remain until the MI Fiber Festival... that means I better get my behind in gear and get my project wish lists in order so I can look for specific yarn instead of buying at random and getting myself in trouble.

Good news: my new job comes with backpay for work I did before I was hired, and I get that August 1 with the next paycheck. Hooray! I need to get those needles flying and finish at least one more major project before I leave for MI....GO!

Did I buy that?

Last night I came home and went through my chores like a whirling dervish so I could get to knitting. The back of Juli's barter cardi is almost done, but I was too tired to get through the rest of it. I only have 4 more rows of the colored pattern to do, and then a few more rows of the main color while decreasing for the raglan sleeve. This is my first raglan sweater, and I can't say that the directions that this pattern is giving me are helping any. Most of the problem is centered around incorporating the color chart along with the raglan decreases. The directions couldn't have been any more unintelligible unless they were in written in Chinese! Now that I've had a bit of experience, it's easy enough to find the center of the chart and the center of the sweater piece and count back to figure out which stitch to start with on the chart. Bleh.

Monday was the day I broke down. One LYS was having a 20% off moving sale, and I went with a couple of my knitting compatriots to have a gander. In my many circuits around the store, I kept coming back to this lovely superwash merino, Aurora 8. I've never worked with it before, but I think I'll enjoy it. It's quite soft, in a lovely dove gray color, and seeing as it's meant for a Christmas gift to a male friend the superwash aspect is perfect. There went my "no buying yarn until August" rule. I'll be the first to admit I'm not perfect, but I figure it's a justified purchase because a) I've been working on my stash reduction and I've been doing a good job of it, and b) the yarn isn't meant for me, ultimately.

Project Linus blanket finished, barter cardi started

Saturday afternoon was spent sewing in the tails of umpteen skeins of yarn. There's a few different colors in the blanket (all in cream - so much for the Summer Sky bit, it's all clouds!), but it doesn't look bad as a finished product. I'll make the swap with Janet as soon as I hear from her.

That done, I finally had a chance to start Juli's barter cardi, made from Lopi. I'm between pieces of my cabled sweater, so I had the size 9 14" needles free to start the back of the cardigan. As of now, I'm almost through the 4" of ribbing that's called for in the pattern. I had to make a +200% blowup copy of the color chart to even begin to be able to read it! Geez, I'm not that old and I still would have needed a magnifying glass to make any sense of it. I don't think that the stockinette portion will take me long, nor will the sweater in general take very long. Provided that I have time to work on it.

Work on the house is progressing, with me trying to paint the remaining 6 of 8 closet doors. It takes 4 hours between coats x2, which means 8 hours to knit in, per pair of doors. Not bad. I may also need to start a smaller more easily transportable project, so I will try to start my gray llama hat as soon as possible. Only one more month until the fiber festival!