I've been writing a series of terribly self indulgent posts about thinking about creative projects as work and about the habit and rhythm that I've been using to get work done, even under adverse circumstances. As exciting as the increased blogging and progress on fiction projects is, I'm just as excited about figuring out how to squeeze in knitting and reading time into my days.
And not to overshadow the importance of figuring out how to make the best of my time, but the other major factor in my return to knitting is that I finally finished the plain sweater that I'd been working on for 7 months (or so) and got to cast on a sweater with a two-color pattern, in a nifty yarn, and a pattern that's strongly reminiscent of my favorite sweater.
I've discovered that while plain knitting is soothing, in many ways, it's not particularly fulfilling or engaging. I've knit--at time of writing--about 9 inches of the body section. This means, I'm about half way to the under arm of the sweater. I don't know if this will linger, but at the moment, I'm so looking forward to this sweater, that I think I might make a series of sweaters based on this, or similar patterns.
I suspect I'll be blogging about this project for a little while, but here are the basics: the pattern is Swedish/Norwegian in styling. The yarn are black and a hand-dyed, from a dyer in Wisconsin that I had made specifically for this project. The background color is called "tree bark," and it's very autumnal and the foreground color is black, so it has a sort of stained glass/water color look to it. The contrast isn't as strong as I had hoped, but the base yarn is similar to the "Shaffer Anne" sock yarn (if that's meaningful to any of you,) and it feels lovely.
Good enough for me!