It's That Time of Year Again...

Dear Blog-

It's time to hide the screaming doormat by the front door and invite innocent people to step in. Time to put out the pumpkins - both plastic and felted - and get into the spirit of fall and harvest and all those wonderful things that people in other parts of the country get to enjoy, while we continue to bake our butts off in 90 degree heat. Ah, yes, fall in the desert Southwest... Will it ever come?

This morning I made myself sit down and sew the buttons on my cabled sweater. This is from a pattern in a Debbie Bliss book called Cashmerino Collection, that we found last year at the Woolly Ewe (I think) on our Hudson Valley yarn crawl. You may recall that on our return trip from hell I started - and finished - the back of another sweater in this same book using Patons CLassic Merino in Leaf Green while waiting endless hours in the Albany and Atlanta airports. For Christmas last year part of my yarn monies went towards buying Knitpicks Sierra in Mist for this sweater. Actually, I ordered the red shade first and when it arrived it was godawful bright so I sent it back with a Thanks, I'll take Mist instead.

I don't enjoy hand-sewing. Even in the years that I made all my clothes for work, I hated hand-sewing and would even do hems by machine. So for me to assemble the sweater after the fun part of knitting it is done is sheer torture and is accomplished by strength of will alone. Okay, not alone, but coupled with the twin desires to have the item usable, and to start the NEXT PROJECT!!! But one does have the pleasure of having it 'finished' in both senses of the word. There is a pleasure in seeing the seams come together invisibly. My husband made the perfect comment when I showed him a side seam, he said it looked as though it had been knitted in the round. Good husband!

I had the pieces laid out on the dining room table last week after blocking, and would sew a couple of seams each day. Then the night before last I sat down and made myself weave in any remaining ends. Thank God there aren't many of those as I usually weave them in as I knit, and any leftover ends I normally weave in at the end of each piece just so that this part doesn't get to be an overwhelming task at the end of a project. But I had a number of ends from my seaming and especially at the spots where the raglans worked into the sweater body.

Then, as I said, this morning I sat down and pledged I would sew on one button before getting up and dashing away. Ok, a second button. Alright, just one more, then I'll be half-finished with this last stage. And before I knew it they were all sewn on. So here is my new sweater -


And it occurs to me that I haven't put a photo in here of a sweater I finished at the beginning of the summer from a Morehouse Farms pattern called the Barbizon Jacket. This was worked in a yarn from Briggs & Little that was another find on our yarn shop crawl of last summer. I was going to knit a sweater a month all through the summer - having a few sweater's worth lined up in queue in the knitting cabinet, but I soon saw the error of that thinking. Also, I do realize this looks like an unmade bed - the woman who rants everytime that she gets a Knitpicks catalogue that she wishes they would take the time to block before they photograph, apparently didn't fold the sweater as carefully as she thought before putting it away... I promise, it doesn't REALLY look asymetrical.





Here are the felted pumpkins...



And gee, while I'm at it, here is a second bag I made that is a modification of my Geranium Leaf Bag pattern. The bead is one my husband made that I wire-wrapped to use as a weight to hold the flap closed. It is hanging next to the Huck Lace Shawl I made from the Morehouse book, in their own lace-weight yarn...





Wanna see something scary? Here is the inside of my knitting cabinet. And yes, it IS organized.




And I am off to spend the rest of the morning working the woolly pears pattern from the new Interweave Holiday issue, and to see if I can't whip up a felted apples pattern to go with...