Thursday, September 14, 2006

Thursday.

I'm kind of at a loss for a clever title today. "Someone Please Shoot Me" was the only other thing I could come up with, and that doesn't really encourage further reading. Not that "Thursday" does either, but, oh, to hell with it. At least it IS Thursday. Sometimes I'm not even that together.


We have the start of a sleeve.


I spent most of Tuesday drawing diagrams on graph paper and punching numbers into my little purple flowered calculator (might as well do math with style) and wound up with the page shown at left. I'm decreasing from 134 stitches down to 68, over 15 inches. Sounds insane, but compared to five hundred whatever stitches I was doing on those yoke rounds, the top of the sleeve seems to go lightning fast, even if it is on an awkwardly short needle, having to turn the entire sweater as I go. I also attempted to get a shot of the three-way meet where the armpit runs into the body. On bottom-up seamless sweaters (like the brown and red jacket), the arm pit is grafted, but on top-down seamless sweaters, the arm pit is cast on, and then picked up in the other direction, and I've gotta say the join is way better looking this way:



And the doily continues apace. I've got 24 rows to go; at two rows per day, that's 12 days, and I've got way more time than that to get this done. (It'll go even faster if I lose my head and do more than two rows in a day, of course.) I still think it's sad that this is my low-stress project at the moment. Anyway, I've almost killed off the first 150 yard spool of thread:



Yesterday I had to take a break from knitting because I'd overdone it and was having muscle spasms in my right thumb and the uncontrollable twitching was REALLY annoying. I sat on my hand most of the evening. Like most problems with my hand, it's about half funny and half annoying. I'm about to start calling it "Thing", after the hand in the Addams Family that did whatever it wanted, all by itself.

And now, back to the sock mines.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Julie!

I just read your Knitty article "The Joy of Swatching." (I admit, I almost didn't due to my discomfort with the S word.) Thanks for writing the article! It DID change my mindset about swatching. I loved your idea that a swatch is a crystal ball into your knitting future. Your writing has a friendly tone. It's funny as well. Cheers!

Bells said...

i could swear that doily isn't growing. But you say it is, so I believe you!

And the sleeve! HOORAY! The world awaits the day you finish the Blue shimmer!!

Sheepish Annie said...

"Sock mines"...heh, heh! Everything is looking great. My hand is aching in sympathy for you!

TrishJ said...

Bells, I agree with you. The doily looks exactly the same as the last time she posted a picture. I think she's scamming us.

I do like the arm pit area on the Blue Shimmer, though! Very cool.

debsnm said...

I got my Patternworks catalog today, and was showing the kidlet the linen (I think) yarn that was $26.50 a skein (hank?) and the short-sleeved suggested sweater. She figured out it would cost almost $140 just for the yarn! And the sweater wasn't even that great. I did find some sock yarn that I thought was reasonably priced, but I think I can get it at my LYS for the same. I did like some of the patterns, and since I have an aversion to knitting ANYTHING in the suggested yarn, I don't have a problem surfing over to Knitpicks or Elann and finding something in the same weight that I probably like better.