January 4, 2003. Sarah Elizabeth shows off her sweater!

June 3, 2002. Pictures of the final sweater:

May 10, 2002. Sweater complete!

It is actually all one color, but for some reason the sections scanned in differently, which is why it looks like few colors above. I'll take an actual photo soon. [Revised to say that the actual photo was taken, and the stinky scanned-in picture was deleted, since it was pointless.] I still have to block it, but that shouldn't be too hard. The right sleeve turned out a bit longer than the left (oops!), but I'm thinking I can stretch the left sleeve when I block it. It looks so cute now, especially with the ducky buttons (I want Ducky Buttons to be my pseudonym for something, maybe if I ever become a switchboard operator). I knew you'd want a better look at those buttons, so here you go:

May 6, 2002. Third time was the charm on the first sleeve of the sweater. The first time, I misread the pattern, and thought I was supposed to knit straight for seven inches, and then decrease. In fact, I was supposed to be decreasing at the same time I was knitting toward that goal of seven inches. So I had to rip out and start again. I was about a third of the way through, when I decided to knit while watching Sexy Beast. Luckily I decided it was too dark and gave up after a few rows. When I went to start knitting again the next day, I saw that, somehow, while watching the movie, I had managed to turn the entire thing around so that I was knitting from the inside of the sleeve, and changing the sleeve from stockinette stitch to reverse stockinette stitch. How I managed to do this without noticing, I have no idea. Once I ripped that out, I was able to complete the entire sleeve without any large ridiculous errors. I'm thinking the other sleeve should go much more smoothly, having learned so many lessons on the first sleeve.

May 1, 2002. Ah, yes, I thought this might happen. Because I've been twisting my stitches on both the knit and the purl rows, now that I am only doing knit stitches on the sleeves (in the round), the fabric looks quite a bit different. It's especially obvious since the sleeve starts with 8 rows of regular stockinette and then switches to knitting in the round. The solutions would be to either reknit the whole sweater (um, no) or redo the beginning of the sleeves, taking care not to twist any stitches. Though then the sleeves would look radically different from the rest of the sweater. So I've decided to just keep going. I've already apologized to Jeannine for making her baby's sweater such a learning experience. My other big accomplishment for the day (besides having 3.25 inches of the left sleeve done) was to figure out how to knit on double pointed needles without having gaps in the knitting between the needles (by knitting a few more from the next needle before switching to a new needle).

April 28, 2002. Hood complete! It's too big to fit on the scanner, so I had to squish two scanned pictures together. I love that it looks like something a macho elf would wear.

I was supposed to graft the top of the hood together, but on the advice of just about everyone, I did the 3-needle bind-off. I really like the way it looks -- much neater than the grafting I did on the shoulder. The one major problem was that I dropped a stitch, and practically hyperventilated while I was ripping back to catch the dropped stitch. It was pretty frightening to try to undo what I'd bound off.

Another new skill: knitting up (to make the ribbed border around the hood). I'd never done this before. I thought it was really fun, like diving for stitches. I realized I've never actually done ribbing before, for real, only on swatches. I completely messed up binding off in ribbing, and had to rip it all out and start again. Luckily I'd really honed my unbinding technique when I messed up the hood.

I only have to do the sleeves, and I'm done with all the knitting on this!

April 24, 2002. Finished the back, started the hood. Grafting the shoulders was a royal pain. I figured out how to do an M1 for the hood increasing, but it doesn't quite look right. It made little holes at the increases. I was under the impression that M1 was an almost-invisible increase. Maybe this has something to do with my whole twisted stitch issue? Anyway, it doesn't look too bad, I don't think, and the thought of ripping out rows with M1 increases makes me really unhappy, so I'm going to continue with the "if I'm going to do it wrong, I'm going to do it wrong consistently" knitting method I've adopted for this project. I've been reading about some people who are perfectionists and rip out huge chunks of knitting if they find one mistake. Hmm...I wonder what that's like?

April 18, 2002. Finished the front of the sweater. It's a good thing you have to do the left front first, because there are some major errors on the neck shaping for the right front, and I don't think I would have figured it out if I hadn't done the other side first. The reason I knew they were errors was because I could tell the sides wouldn't be symmetrical if I did it the way they were telling me to -- for the left front, you bind off the button band and decrease inward from there, but for the right front they were having me bind off part of the shoulder, and decrease from there. Which makes no sense. Especially also because they way they have it written it ends with a right-side row, and then they say to knit the next row, which would reverse the stockinette stitch pattern. I don't know if the way I ended up doing it is right or not, but here's what I did:

Neck Shaping:
P 17, bind off last four st knitwise, cut yarn. Join yarn, K2Tog, k to end of row. P to last 2 st, P2tog. Complete as for left front.

Here's what it looks like now:

April 17, 2002. I made it to the armpit on the hooded baby sweater! So I did two things I've never done before: put stitches on holders, and bound off stitches at the armpit (I've bound off stitches before, but not just a few in a row). So now I've started up the left front, and hopefully soon it will actually look like a sweater. It's pretty clear that I'm not an expert knitter at all. Here's what I've got so far:

What on earth's going on with that button band? The one for the left front (the side on the knitting needle) is the one with the buttonholes, so that's what some of those strange-looking spots are there. But what's the deal there where the button band on the right front just suddenly jogs over one stitch?

Also, my stitches are completely uneven. Here's a sample:

It's like Julie's gone-off-her-rockinette stitch! And do you notice that bit of craziness on the right side? Let's look at that more closely, shall we?

Can someone tell me what this is? I'm not really worried about it, since it seems to have worked itself out, but what is it?

Despite all this whining, I'm so completely psyched that I've gotten as far as I have on this sweater, and I'm still thinking it looks great (for me, that is).

April 10, 2002. Progress. Six rows from the armpit. I was going to post the picture, but seeing as how it looks exactly like the April 7 picture, I decided that would be silly.

April 7, 2002. Then here's my progress so far on the hooded baby sweater. It's coming along nicely, although this picture makes it look like a fancy dishcloth.

April 4, 2002. My latest project is the Hooded Lime Jacket from the Better Homes & Gardens Knit It! magazine. It's for my college roommate's baby; she's due in June, so I have a little bit of time, but not much. Here's a picture as it is in the magazine: