Rows and rows

Last night I started feeling pressure and terrible stabbing pains in my jaw. I knew right away what it was, although I was hoping I was wrong. I wasn’t though, so… I have what is very likely an abscessed tooth. I’m on antibiotics now, and it will get fixed once the infection is gone, but for the moment I look like a very lopsided chipmunk. I’ve cleared my schedule for tomorrow (really, singing is not in the cards) but I can’t help Sunday, so I hope I feel better by then!

I didn’t have any health insurance for years, and Marc actually had to remind me today that I didn’t have to tough it out – and he even went with me, and then made my favorite soup for dinner (it was hard to eat, but it was so nice of him!)

Thank you to all who commented on my shawlette – I hope some of you considering the pattern give it a chance, it was so fun to knit!

Now that the shawlette is finished I’m concentrating on my “Something Green.” It seemed to take forever to get the sleeves separated, but here they are at last (my raglan length is a little over 8″ rather than the 10″ called for in the pattern.)

I really am enjoying the Blue Sky cotton this time, although I can admit that you can see me rowing out like crazy (rowing out is when either your knit or purl rows are noticeably looser.) There are times this would bother me, and I might be tempted to use combined knitting, but not for this cardigan. I think it will look fine in the casual style, and at any rate I’m about to switch into ribbing.

This isn’t, perhaps, the most exciting sweater ever. It’s entirely possible that I’m knitting it out of spite – the last time I tried this (nearly two years ago) it all went tragically wrong. First my gauge went crazy halfway through, so I started over. Then I experienced my one and only case of an Options needle cable breaking. This was before I could fix dropped stitches very well, so I had to frog back quite a lot. Then I found I was unhappy with the way the ribbing increases were working out, so I kept frogging back. Then I realized the yarn (Knitpicks Shine Worsted) was going to be really unsuitable for the sweater. I finally spent about 2 hours of a very long car trip, making the world’s largest ball of frogged yarn.

But I still wanted to sweater, so when I was looking for an excuse to give Blue Sky cotton another try I dusted off the ole PDF file.

I’m a little worried about the increases, but this time I am armed with a different sort of increase, and I suspect this yarn will be more forgiving than the Shine worsted, which seemed to highlight every single bump.

While looking through old photos, I actually found my previous attempt, only a little bit past where I am now.

It looks so different from my current attempt that it’s difficult to compare. It looks better in this photo, but in real life it was so much worse. Less rowing out, but a whole lot heavier, and too big to boot (I used to think I was a 34″ bust. That was clearly wishful thinking.) And the ribbing… ugh. This time I’m thinking of doing combined knitting for the ribbing, because the effect is so much neater.

I’m trying not to start anything new until this is more finished. I’ve still got shawls on the brain, and yarn to make 4 or 5 of them (or 6 or 7…) I also have lots of sweaters to make, and Coraline is technically on the needles, although I haven’t done much with it because I’m really afraid of running out of steam.

I hope you all have a lovely weekend!