Still November

Have I mentioned recently how much I love knitting sweaters in the round? I do and I'm especially glad that the Cobblestone sweater is worked this way. Once the body was complete to the underarms it didn't take long at all to knit the sleeves and by Friday afternoon I was ready to join them all together.


Which went fine, though those rounds right after joining are really long. Plus there are some short-rows in the back which are a great design detail but do mean that for a while you're doing a lot of knitting without gaining a lot of length. A chilly, quiet weekend meant lots of good knitting time and now I'm past the first set of decreases (hurrah!) and heading up towards the neck.

Sorry about the iffy photos, not much light here this month.

I'm not entirely confident that I'm going to make it by the end of November but I'm still going to try. Himself has been keeping a keen eye on my progress and we've certainly had sweater weather recently. Congrats to my fellow NaKniSweMo knitters who are already done!

Deadlines can be good motivators but I think I've had too much deadline knitting in the past few months so I've decided not to do any Christmas knitting this year. Not least because if I wanted to do my normal amount I would have needed to start weeks ago. Initially this decision made me a bit sad but I don't think it's worth making myself crazy, and I have distributed some yarny goodness throughout the year. Also there are a few wee bairns coming in the new year who surely will need some woolies.

Speaking of Christmas deadlines: Do you think my paper whites are going to make it?

Friday Yarn Pr0n (and more changes)

I am maybe a little bit obsessed with this yarn:


It's Topsy Wool from Topsy Farm on nearby Amherst Island. This is not what you'd call a highly processed yarn. The hand is a bit rough, there is the odd bit of twig.

Maybe it's some sort of genetic memory? It's practically begging to be made into something dense and durable, something more about survival than fashion. It's like wool from an earlier time.


NaKniSweMo progress took a bit of a hit this week but for a good cause: I started my new job. It all happened a bit fast and I'm still on a learning curve but I'm also very excited! Having interesting work with great people and tonnes of learning opportunities is such an energizing prospect.

The past two months seem to have flown by and there have been so many changes but things are really coming together and settling in. There's even time to slow down and toast achievements. Happy days.

Fall Back

I never meant to be one of those people who starts out all their blog posts apologizing for how long its been since the last blog post. Yet I find myself in that position again.

This last weekend when the clocks fell back Adam and I had a real sense that we were falling back into our real lives. The past six weeks have been insane and slightly blurred and very happy but we are glad that the pace is starting to slow again.


All of the wedding knitting did get done in time. Just. I was knitting the toe on the second of Adam's marryin' socks at 2:00 AM the morning of the ceremony and my Mom was weaving in the ends on my shawl hours before hand (Thanks Mom!). I won't say much about the wedding (which probably deserves it's own post once the photos come in) except that it was lovely and what we had hoped for.

And a slower pace should mean a bit more time for knitting and blogging. During the whirlwind of the wedding weekend my friend Lynn and I made a "blog more" pact and I know Lynn is not going to let me slack on this one. In case that wasn't enough incentive I've decided to do NaKniSweMo this year. I know, I know one would think that I would be running from even the idea of more deadline knitting at this point. But I've had a sweater for Adam in my Ravelry queue for months* and the yarn conveniently arrived while we were away. Also who can say no to Shannon?


I filled in that late-October gap (and quite a bit of travelling-back-from-the-Rockies time) with some mitten knitting. This looked smart when we returned to Kingston in the midst of a nasty snowstorm, but today as I'm finishing them off it's 15 C and sunny outside. I feel confident they'll be needed soon enough.


These are Elizabeth Zimmermann's mitered mitts, one of the May projects in the Knitter's Almanac and the yarn is Noro Kureyon in 149, which is the same yarn as the Noro Hat I knit back in February. The pattern is typical of EZ, really more of a suggested way of proceeding than a line by line pattern. I made long cuffs and trimmed them with garter and used the thumb trick rather than an afterthought thumb. I worked these on 3.75 mm needles so they're pretty dense, but I like a firmly knit mitten - keeps the wind out. The Knitter's Almanac is the smallest of EZ's books but it is a real treasure trove of patterns. It was published in 1974 and the photography could use updating but the meat of the book remains totally relevant, as a quick browsing of Ravelry projects from it reveals.

We still haven't completely unpacked from the move, nor have we opened most of our wedding gifts. But there will be time for those sorts of things...right now we are reveling in the decompression. I need to wash my kitchen floor. I need to get my hair cut. I need to find a new job. But I also need to knit, and to blog, and I will.


*I never really bought into the whole 'boyfriend sweater curse' thing, but surely now I have NO excuses.