I finished knitting a sweater. I posted pictures of this to twitter, so I guess in a way, I’ve scooped myself.

But I did it. This sweater has a special story…

I think it’s worth mentioning that--if there are any knitters left reading this that I’m sort of haphazardly working on a collection of knitting patterns and stories/essays. Patterns in the sense that you could get a bunch of yarn and some needles and read and end up with a sweater that probably looks like the one I have. But not patterns in the sense that I’m not writing instructions for knitting, but rather stories about my life and the creative process that embed the instructions for knitting sweater. This post isn’t exactly one of those, thought I do hope to get to the sweater in question at some point soon.

But then don’t they all.

I initially called this sweater “Latvian Dreams” and the idea was that I’d blog about the sweater as I knitted it as a sort of adventuresome knit along.

It turned into a nightmare.

And I never did really blog about it in the way that I might have liked to….

I was working in a yarn store at the time, and it seemed like a good idea at the time. I was knitting a lot. I was pretty serious into blogging at this point, and it seemed like a good idea.

It wasn’t.

In an effort to create a pattern that would be easy for other people to pickup, particularly people who might not have been particularly adept at the kind of stranded two color knitting I find so entrancing, the patterns I chose were almost too simple, and I never really got into them.

It’s not, I suppose terribly fair to say that the patterns were too simple…

The patterns were all symmetrical, both top to bottom and side to side. I chose three different patterns, arranged things to be reminiscent of an Aran sweater, and they even synced up with each-other so that there was a regular repeat that I thought would help people memorize the stitches.

And the whole thing was sort of like pulling teeth.

I mean it all worked out in the end, so I suppose I can’t complain about anything but the time that it took to make the blasted thing. It’s a good sweater. Even though I haven’t blocked it yet, I’m struck by how well it works. The yarn is fine--hence part of the scope of the project--and it fits really well. I must know a thing or two about how to knit sweaters.

And somehow it’s a bit bittersweet.

In a lot of ways this is the kind of sweater that I don’t really have the attention or focus to be able to even ponder making now. Too much attention even in the planning, not to mention the scope of the carry through. It’s not that I’ve lost the technical ability to knit a sweater like this, it’s as if my life has moved on, and it took those kinds of sweaters with it, and that’s sort of hard.

No lies, I’m glad to be done. For sure.