My most recent designing project is a sweater. I'm making the sample for my daughter, but I like it so much that I'm considering making one in my size as well. So right now I'm not exactly sure what sort of size range I'll be writing this one for.
If you're familiar with my clothing designs, you can probably guess that I have a bit of a sock yarn fettish. There are just so many fun colorways in the sock yarn I have access to in my area, and one skein is always around 400 yards, which really makes you feel like you can make someTHING! Because of this, I also have the "I'll just buy 1 skein" disease. Because you can certainly make something about of one skein, right? Except I'm not the biggest fan of knitting socks, and scarves aren't my favorite thing to design, and those are the two things that always spring to mind when I have one special skein of sock yarn.
Anyhoo...on my Chicago / Wisconsin yarn crawl back in August, I picked up 3 skeins of Silky Wool. They were a blue-based green, which is right up my daughter's alley, and they had a rustic heathered look. I thought 600 yards of dk would be more than enough for a size 8 sweater. Fast-forward to last week when I was deciding what style this sweater would be. I swatched, I did the math, I decided I would have just enough yarn to make the style I wanted. Then, mid-project, I decided I wanted to lengthen the sleeves and add a hood. Guess what. The body sucked up 2 whole skeins and the third skein gave me one full sleeve and left me about 4 rows short on the second sleeve. On my Facebook business page, Sally told me that if I knit very, very fast then the yarn would hold out....but it looks like I'm just not quite fast enough yet. :) The hood and button band have yet to be invented.
The good news is, I LOVE how it's coming together. And my LYS is actually receiving their first order of this type of yarn in a week or so, and one of the wonderful owners said she'd add the color I need to their delivery list. Please send me some "the two dye lots are a perfect match!" vibes.
So yesterday I swatched with a new yarn, but I still don't know what it wants to be. I placed a Knit Picks order yesterday, too, and those are often delivered in less than a week, so I'll have 2 new projects on my hands when that arrives. One is a sample knit for a pattern that's already in the testing phase and the second is a stuffed animal. I'm looking forward to that project. The closest thing to a stuffed animal that I've put out is the sock monkey blanket, but this thing will be a full-body, arms, legs & all sort of thing. It hadn't quite gelled in my head yet, but I've got the general idea. I'm going to use Knit Picks Palette Yarn, which I haven't tried before, so I'm looking forward to that, too. For the sample knit, I ordered Knit Picks Tonal Sock Yarn in "Springtime", which reminds me a lot of the Three Irish Girls yarn I used on the Guacamole sweater. I've used this yarn before on the Charlotte Dress and I think that the cable pattern will stand out better on this yarn than it did on the first yarn I tried the sweater in.
On top of all that, I'm still waiting on the yarn I have on order for the famous Owl Sweater. It's a custom dye job, so I think I was told it could take between 8-12 weeks. So if all goes well, I might have that project completed by mid-winter.
At any rate, I need to figure something out today so I have something to knit tomorrow. My kids have appointments at the doctor's office, and my son has a dentist appointment (which will mean at least an hour of waiting room-time for me!) Then in the evening I'll want to go to Knit Night, and I certainly don't want to show up there empty-handed! Or maybe I should and I could work on the store sample hat that's been sitting on the coffee table in the middle of the shop for the past month. I asked about it last week and one of the owners told me that she and the other owner are playing "knitting chicken" with it. It's something they need to get done to have as a sample for the store, but neither of them wants to work on it. So it sits on the table week after week an they're both hoping the other one will crack and pick it up first!
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