Rob has been away all week. I scheduled today off work so I’d be able to leave a bunch of stuff undone during the rest of the week and just focus on spending time with Maisie and getting dinner on the table. Today involved a lot of running around doing errands and picking up stuff around the house. Of course one of the things I’d put off was taking bit of time to myself so for a little while, in the middle of the day, I sat and worked on my knitting (the Violet Cap from issue No. 1 of Making) and listened to Tanis and Ashley chat on the Woolful podcast. I’ve never listed to a podcast before and it was really nice. I’ve been a fan of Tanis Fiber Arts for a long time and have always enjoyed reading Tanis’s blog about her business and her family but getting to hear her voice was really neat. I finished the last repeat of my hat just about the end of the podcast. I’ve tried it on a couple of times while its been in progress and it seems like it’s going to fit. I took a bit of a gamble and didn’t swatch so this is very nice to discover. Reaching the decreases on a hat is always exciting. They just fly along after that point. Of course, it’s now to cold outside for a fingering weight hat but if I finish it now it will be ready to go in the spring when I need it.

I’m wearing my new sweater today and it is just what I wanted. The pattern is Clarke by Jane Richmond. I’ve been wanting to make this sweater since seeing her in-progress sample last summer and snapped up the pattern as soon as it was released. I love the colour combination she used but wanted to work from my stash as much as possible. All the colours in my sweater are leftover skeins of Cascade 220. The red was a full skein (thus giving me my three stripes) and the others were all partial skeins. I bought the grey to tie them together. I also bought a scale to weight my skeins as I went along. I was really set on getting three stripes out of the red and needed to track my yarn carefully to make sure I’d have enough yarn for both sleeves. I have a very small ball of leftovers. I had to do a minor pattern adjustment to accommodate my gauge. My swatch was just a bit looser than the pattern gauge but I didn’t like the feel of a tighter fabric in this yarn. With the aid of a bit of math I determined that the stitch counts for the 34” size would give me the widths for the 36” size. The pattern is fill-in-the-blank style so I filled in all the stitch counts from the 34” and the lengths from the 36”. My sweater fits just the way I wanted it to: it’s loose but not billowy, the sleeves are close fitting but roomy enough to get a shirt underneath, the fabric is dense but soft, and the collar is just right - not tight, not open. The only other adjustment I made was to add an extra half inch to the sleeve lengths. When I finished my first sleeve I tried on my sweater to see how it fit and decided it was just a smidge short. I like my sleeves to go well over my wrists and cover the base of my hand a bit in a cozy shirt. I played a bit of yarn chicken doing those sleeves and ended up having to search out and buy a third skein of grey in the same dye lot for my extra inch of knitting. Consequently the stash is down five but up one. Grey is always useful though.

I took these pictures on the trail near our house. I was a little worried about a rambunctious dog coming along and knocking over my tripod but I had the trail to myself for the duration of my photo shoot. I’d been hoping for sunshine to record my sweater but at this time of year sunny = cold. It was a very pleasant -11℃ with very little wind while I was outside. A pearly overcast day probably shows the colours better anyway.

Ravelry link with details here.

Sometimes, especially on really colds days when she's been covered up for our walk, Maisie doesn't want to get out of the amouti when we get home. She pushes back the hood and pulls off her hat and she'll ask me to help her get a toy or two and then she'll just hang out, on my back, until she's ready to get down. I think she probably enjoys seeing the house from a different point of view.