Yarn Puzzle

If I would stop stealth knitting, you would get blog posts.  I'm planning a post for late March that will show you what I've been up to in January and February, but you're going to have to wait until then for most of my knitting progress.

For today, however, I have some good yarn-y news.

I have finished all the pieces for my sweater!

Yes, my NaKniSweMo sweater is finally cast off.  It's currently blocking (perched precariously on my piano) and looks like a puzzle waiting to be put together...  A sweater sized jigsaw puzzle...

The second sleeve is hiding down on the piano bench.  Each sleeve took a whole skein of yarn.  Or, to rephrase, it took 200 yards per sleeve to make them long enough for me.  Of course, it was after knitting all 400 yards (or 50 inches) of sleeve and putting the whole thing in to soak that I noticed the mistake below:

Two stitches that should have been knit that I distractedly purled instead.  If I had noticed before binding off above it, it would have been an easy fix to just drop the offending columns one at a time and crochet hook up again the right way.  Now I'm going to have to resort to scissoring.  After it dries, I'm going to have to snip that stitch in the middle, pull those stitches out, and weave new yarn through the stitches correctly, and then, of course, weave in the four ends created by that process.  I do not like having scissors near my knit-work.  It's disaster waiting to happen... (Even on the occasions when disaster did not happen, it was still waiting.)

My goal was to finish the sweater by the end of February, and I'm awfully close.  If February was a 31-day month, I would have cast off in February, but February cheats everyone out of a few days.  Yes, it's February's fault.  We won't blame all the other projects that I worked on and/or completed during that time, or me for working on those other projects.  After all, I had other deadlines to meet, too.  Nope-blame the anomalous 28-day second month.

My next big project is going to be Cassie Miller's Aster Vest, but I'm not going to let myself start it until I have completely finished this sweater.