UGH.

FIRST of all, thank you so much for the lovely comments on the Gallery Jacket! Sheffield has arrived and it is quite beautiful. I can't wait to see how the pattern works out for people. The garment has been cat-nap tested and approved:




Unfortunately my next sweater project wasn't as successful. In fact, I have a sweater disaster on my hands. The squeamish should avert their eyes, and maybe not read any further.


This is my Minimalist Cardigan, knit with the ridiculously hard to photograph Terra in Madder. This sweater should have been done weeks ago. I loved knitting the easy pieces, I didn't even mind the moss stitch since I knit Continental. After all that twisted ribbing for the Gallery Jacket, allover moss stitch was like a vacation! I'd heard that moss stitch is a pain to seam so I'd decided to back stitch a lot of them. It's bulky, yes, but it's quick and I just wanted to wear this thing. I made a small mistake sewing the sleeve in and while I was undoing my seams I...may have used scissors. I know, I know, I should have slowly unpicked it but come on! I was already rushing...and drinking...and tired.

Can you guess what happens next? I snipped my knitting. And this isn't yarn you would want to steek. It is partially alpaca, partially silk, very slippery. I tried to patch my holes and build them up with crochet. This worked reasonably well and stayed the slippage, but as expected it had a much different texture than the knitting--thick, inflexible and of course, right up front. I started to seam this but it was sort of hopeless. There is no way to make it look neat at this point. I'm all out of yarn. The only solution I can think of is to remove the sleeves, rip out the sleeve caps and some of the sleeve and then re-knit the caps with whatever yarn is available.

To be honest, this wouldn't be terrible. A lot of the finished sweaters have sleeves that are the same length as the body--it yields a sort of boxy, square shape. Shortening the sleeves would circumvent that, right? Right? I MEANT to do that...yeah...that's the ticket...

Congrats to Melissa who expertly, patiently, soberly finished a Minimalist Cardigan last weekend. We were both in our element knitting at a brewfest in Greenfield [thanks again for the excellent pictures, Melissa!]:






Speaking of old SNL, I recently "discovered" the music of Loudon Wainwright watching the Season 1 DVDs. This isn't from SNL, but it's a pretty excellent song. Enjoy!


CR