I have finally established the knitting of the body of my new sweater, and it progresses slowly. I haven’t been knitting on something that wasn’t a sleeve or a sock, since late November, so I forget how different the pace feels for sweater bodies.
I knit about 2 inches on the sleeve yesterday, and another inch or so today (so far; I have yet to watch the Torchwood that I have in store. There will be more knitting).
By my calculations, if I knit just two inches a day, I’ll easily get to the underarm of the sweater in a bit more than a week. Which is quite exciting. The yoke section might take a week because it is a fiddly bit of knitting, and then a few days for the finishing, so this sweater seems pretty much on pace, baring something unexpected.
It’s a fun pattern to knit and I’m really enjoying the sweater, though I’m worried that my gauge has changed, but it’s really quite possible that it hasn’t, so I’m not going to worry about it.
The next sweater is going to be a raglan-shouldered pullover, knit in what I hope will be a drape-y fabric, out of a merino-possum yarn that’s been in the family stash for a long time. Why yes it is, teal. I haven’t made a determination about the construction direction.
My thought is that I’ll cast on provisionally somewhere in the middle of the sweater, do the busy part around the shoulder, and then knit the sleeves and body from the shoulder to the lower hems after I’m sure that I’m able to do the math. I’d like to have a neat v-neck, and I’m willing to steek, but I’m not sure how to get it to all add up right in the end.
I must ponder further.
My search for the right kind of surgical steel (316L) continues with limited success. The smallest rods you can get are between a US size 3 and 4, which is way too big for what I’m looking for. It turns out that you can get straight “spring wire” that’s smaller than a US 0, but nothing for the US size 2.5 (3.0mm) and US 1.5 (2.5mm) that I find useful let alone other sizes in the 2.0mm to 3.0mm range. Sigh.
But there’s real work to be done, knitting pattern development, and job applications. I’ll be in touch?
Cheers, tycho