So I've been talking about how close I am to getting back on the knitting game for weeks and weeks. While for the past two months I've knitted more than I had in the previous two or three months, until this last week, I still hadn't been knitting much.

And then, this last week, I'm not sure what happened, but I got enough momentum on my projects that I've been able to make some real progress on projects, and with that progress my interest and enthusiasm has grown pretty significantly.

I don't have pictures or anything instructive yet, but I'm paying attention to projects again, and thinking about what's going to be my next project. I'll post the highlights and blog over the next several days/week about more specific details.

1. I was knitting a teal sweater, using a possum/merino yarn that I despise. Despite finishing (and steaking the neck opening,) I'm tossing it in the frog/sell pile. The yarn sheds, it looks like there are multiple dye/carding lots, and it's a really fuzzy yarn, to the point that knitting it made me sneeze, and it shed, and it was too warm to sit under and knit, let alone wear. Anyway, I think this is well reasoned, and having it off of my plate makes me feel incredibly good.

2. I finished the "Grey Sweater of Doom," or what I was fondly calling "that god damned sweater," by the end. This is a sweater that I cast on in the fall of 2005, and have been slowly working on, off and on since then. The sweater is knit with a fingering weight lambswool and alpaca. It's mostly plain but there are some small cable accents. In a feat that I'm pretty proud of, I was able to make a perfectly fitted sweater without swatching, [1] and since I knit off a cone, with wool there were only 2 extra ends to weave in, in addition to the normal edge ends (that is there were 6 ends total, but 4 of them are conceptually unavoidable.) I'm proud of this one, and even though it took forever, I want to make another one kind of like it.

3. The Latvian Dreaming Sweater. I have finished the body of this sweater, so all that remains is the collar and the sleeves. This is a project that where I'm conceptually giving away the pattern as I knit it. I'm a bit behind, and have to write some instructions for the shoulders. But this is a part of the pattern where there are a lot of options, so there'll be a number of posts about this in the next few weeks.

4. A pair of socks. About a year ago I visited Sheri at the Loopy Ewe and bought a skein of yarn, because it was amazing looking, despite the fact that I don't really knit normal socks very often. So this skein lingered in the stash, rolled up into a ball: apparently I got pretty close a while back to casting on, but chickened out. Then on Saturday I picked it up and cast on 64 stitches for a sock. It's going well, and I already have 3-4 inches done.

That's all I have right now. How has your knitting been going.

[1]For the non-knitters, swatches are samples that you knit to help figure out how many stitches/knitting you need in a project. Also, while I don't usually don't swatch, in this case, the sweater is constructed in such a way that you don't need to know your gauge. This is pretty cool, I think.