Thank you so much for all the nice comments on the Audubon Jacket in the last post. I have to tell you, I’m having the hardest time *not* wearing it every single day. I think my favorite thing about it is that it is a big bulky warm sweater, perfect for the freeking insane brisk temperatures we’ve been having, that doesn’t act big and bulky. I think the merino yarn may have something to do with that. In the meantime, I’ve been suffering through the weather and thinking about other warm knits….

As the title says, Winter is for Sweaters, at least that’s what I’ve decided! I was reading a post over at Tara’s blog the other day where she was looking for suggestions on whether to knit a pullover or a cardigan (I personally voted for the oh-so-versitle cardigan) when I started to think about how many sweaters worth of yarn I had hanging around on the yarn wall. Four or five maybe?

Oh lordy was I a bit off. Let’s break this down a bit more shall we?

From the top from left to right:

Silky Wool – see below

Morehouse Merino Three Ply – Barbizon Jacket

Next row:

Paton’s Classic Merino – Something with cables

Borroco Ultra Alpaca – “Weekend Pullover” in the fall 2006 IK

Next row:

Jo Sharp Soho Summer – Pattern TBD (to be determined)

Purple Cascade 220 – Eris perhaps?

Black cotton-ease – Pattern TBD

Green Mountain Spinnery – Pattern TBD (a simple cardigan perhaps?)

As you can see toward the bottom of the picture I finally gave up on pulling out *all* the skeins because they just wouldn’t fit on the table!

And that Silky Wool? That would be from the box that finally arrived last week containing 16 skeins for a sweater from Cables Untangled.

Of course this is all not counting the materials for my current sweater obsession:

That would be the Fairly Easy Fair Isle from Stitch ‘n Bitch Nation (with my own choice of colors). (See Beth, mystery solved! ) To those of you who played along with my little guessing game from that mystery post, here is your answer (I was really amazed at how close some of you got!). I started this sweater on Jan. 28th and had started the yoke before I sat down last Saturday and finished it up. I took this picture when I was nearly done not thinking that I would actually finish knitting it that day. 

Finishing it wasn’t altogether the smartest idea since I do believe I sent myself into some muscle spasms and tendon distress after that much knitting with big needles and big yarn. I appear to still be paying for that little lapse in judgement so I’m trying to cool it for a bit (sadly I need these hands for silly things like doing the job that puts food on the table). For those of you who will tell me what a fast knitter I am, this is made in Lamb’s Pride Bulky on size 10.5 needles. Not exactly a whole sweater with fingering yarn on microscopic needles in a week, is it?

If there is good news in my stupidity oversight in the “take a break” department it is the fact that completing the yoke gave me about 12 billion ends to weave in to give my hands and arms something different to do. The “fairly easy” part of this sweater is apparently the lack of need for steeking, something that I suddenly appreciate the value in, although I’m not exactly running out to try it. If you do not like sewing in ends, this is not the sweater for you! Every color change has two ends and that frequently includes the main color too since the knitting and purling on opposite rows left the main yarn at the wrong end more than once.

My main complaint with this (besides all the ends) is the fact that I ran out of the main color. I usually buy an extra skein and for some reason I didn’t do it this time (probably because I bought the yarn with the gift certificate HWJF got my for Christmas). I managed to find another skein of black in a very close dyelot at Woolbearers last weekend (and somehow a bag of handpainted merino roving ended up coming home too… not sure how that happened ) so I’ll be finishing up the button band hopefully by the end of the week. I may even find buttons for it tonight.

So what’s the point of all this? The point is that I’ve decided that while the weather is cold, I need to knit sweaters since I certainly have the yarn! The socks and lace can wait for days when I don’t want half a sheep worth of wool sitting in my lap. The time for sweater knitting is now!

So what should the next sweater knit from this crazy stash be for me? Any opinions?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 7th, 2007 at 1:39 pm and is filed under Fairly Easy Fair Isle, Stash. 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.