Sweater updates

I've been moving along in the sweater-production phase pretty steadily recently. Exhibit 1:

A finished almost-for-Dad-sweater, which needs to be photographed, packed up, and sent off to the US so I can get my brother to do a photo shoot for me ASAP. I'm hoping to have the pattern available by the middle or end of October. A vest version will follow shortly thereafter.

Exhibit 2:

Progress being made on sleeve #2 of my Dahlia cardigan A finished Dahlia cardigan being blocked. I had to cannibalize my failed Aleita Shell for the second sleeve, but I'm hoping to have it done by the end of the month it's actually almost done! Left to do: sew up the seams on the back and decide whether or not to make the front panels a bit longer.

Exhibit 3:

115 yards of dark grey Falklands, for the River Run pullover. This was the one color I messed up on in the dyeing process, by dyeing about half the yardage I actually needed (in my defense, I think that's a boo boo in the yardage requirements in the pattern, but whatever). I spun up another skein pretty quickly, but it took a few days to get the color close enough to work. It's not the same, but there's so much going on in the colorwork, that I'm hoping it will be good enough. But I'm about halfway up the armholes, so I'm feeling like it's moving along. By the end of the current repeat, I should be able to put in the neck steek. And then I'll be almost done with the body!

It's definitely turning into sweater-knitting weather here (even despite todays 25 plus degrees - WTF September?). I'm already itching to get the next batch on the needles. There's some handspun that needs to be knit up for the girls, and I'm having fits about doing Pas de Valse in overdyed alpaca again, so I might actually have to get going on that. And then there's this to deal with - anybody have any good handspun sweater suggestions?

Who's sweater exactly?

Finally, at long last, I have finished (the knitting on) my Dad's birthday sweater. However, not only is this not the original birthday sweater, it's also not going to go to Dad.

After my shocking realization that knitting a sweater for my father includes working four feet of sleeves, not including sleeve caps, and the fact that it was a bit closer fitting then I had envisioned, I had to repurpose the whole thing. 'Cause with 1.5 sleeves and an entire body done, there's no way I was going to either trash the thing or rip it back and redo it.

So now it's going to my brother, who only has 21 inches of arm to cover. And who has promised me a photoshoot once he gets it. The plan is to hit publish and go sew in the sleeves. Blocking will commence at 21:00 hours, plus or minus a bit, and it should get into the mail by the end of the week. Hooray for a September sweater!

Birthday presents

One for me, one for my MIL (in progress):

One LYS down, one to go!

The dangers of having tall relatives

I was hoping, in some very out-of-touch and theoretical way, to finish a sweater before we left for the States. Then I was hoping to get a lot done on the plane (seeing as how I strategically seated myself away from the rest of my family...), and managed to get through most of the increases on sleeve #2.

That was all well and good. And since I got to see the intended recipient, I decided it might be wise to measure his arms and make sure that I'd made the sleeves long enough.

Well. That was a mistake...

I'd knit sleeve #1 to be 18.5 inches long at the underarm, the totally reasonable length suggested by my lovely sweater design software.

My Dad's arms require sleeves that are at least 23 inches long.

Um.

What kind of genetic mutant (no offense Dad!) has arms almost two feet long? It's not like I'm knitting a sweater for Larry Bird, right? Or Michael Phelps?

Suffice to say that my lovely father, having now waited five months for his birthday sweater, is going to have to wait a bit longer. I've got enough yarn, but the last skein is, predictably enough, on top of my washing machine in London. Bah! It's going to be nice though, once it's done...

I swear to Bob I'm going to finish a sweater this month

Sadly, but totally unsuprisingly, I've fallen a bit behind in my quest to knit 11 sweaters this year. However, I have high hopes for the month of August!

That is the body and back, and the start of the front of a manly man sweater. That is going to be for...someone for whom I started a sweater before deciding (with some input from his spouse) that it wasn't quite his thing and I should probably give it to someone who would appreciate it fully. Like my spouse, who has been making goo goo eyes at the thing since I started it, but that's another story.

This yarn was rescued from my abandoned Hurrication vest from the fall of 2008. Intended recipient is a big fan of blue, so I overdyed the yarn with some Jacquard Acid dyes.

I've blogged before about my previous attempts to dye sweaterlots of yarn so as to avoid dye lot variability. As you can see from the above picture, it didn't work out so well this time! So I separated out the various shades of blue that I ended up with and re-dyed the seriously lighter ones. I'm knitting the sweater alternating every row or every two rows from two skeins of yarn, in hopes of minimizing any major color differences. It helps that even the darker/brighter skeins have some variability as well. I don't think you can see a difference...

I'm loving the way the stitch pattern looks. When blocked, it flattens out quite a bit, but still keeps that wavey feel. I'm hoping to finish this up in the next couple of weeks, and get the pattern out to testers by the end of this week. Look for this one to be available in early October, just in time for fall knitting!