True confessions

Thanks to a course cancellation that opened up my work schedule but simultaneously has left me a little lean in the money department, I am home during daylight hours today. Which means I was able to snap a shot of that cowl I started on Friday:



What's that? It looks nearly done? Um, yeah. It's coming together fast - I haven't been working on it non-stop or anything. It's just sort of happening. I've got nearly seven repeats of the fishscale lace pattern done, and judging by the (not pictured) remaining cakelet of yarn, I'll be able to do eight before doing a few rounds of edging to match what I started with, and then it'll get bound off and wait for blocking. (No, the sink still isn't clean.)

I also finished winding up this:



Yarn for a new sweater for me. Thursday Special is the plan.

I also took apart that in-need-of-a-reknit sleeve for my Oblique over the weekend. I didn't take a picture of it, though. Undid the end of my bind off, then pop pop pop, out all the stitches came, one by one, right down to the ribbing of the cuff. I didn't take it apart in its entirety - after all, there's no problem with the ribbing.

Now. The astute out there may notice something. I am planning on knitting a new sweater for myself, and I am planning on starting from scratch, despite the fact that I have a complete back piece and two bits of sleeve pieces for another one already on the go. My previously mentioned hangups with Oblique should now be completely null and void, because the new sweater plan involves a sweater that has great big lace panels as its fronts. Clearly, the lace isn't the obstacle preventing me from continuing on with Oblique. So what gives?

Well, I asked myself the same question, and gave the whole thing some actual conscious thought - I did this while standing around outside during a fire drill at work. I really like the shape and texture of the finished sweater, looking over the sample images and pics others have shared of their sweaters. So I was surprised when I started considering that maybe I should scrap the whole thing.

The problem is the yarn. Despite the fact that nothing about the progress I've made so far suggests that I should be really worried at this point, my near miss in yarn chicken with my sister's sweater has made me twitchy. In the end, I ended up needing more than a single skein for each of the fronts, using up just a bit more than six skeins total - far more than the five I had intended to use when I started. So it was a really, really good thing that the yarn plan ended up changing for that sweater.

For Oblique, I'm using some Dream in Color Classy that I had stashed - I've got four skeins. I've successfully gotten a big cozy sweater out of this amount before, because I made my Nanook cardi out of another batch of four skeins of this yarn (though in a different colour). So it should work out. According to the yardage requirements in the pattern, it should work out. But there are lots of comments indicating that the yardage requirements in the pattern are actually wrong, and that the sweater eats more yarn than indicated. To counter this, I did some shortening - I shortened the sleeves by several inches, and I also shortened the back piece, which means the fronts will be shorter too. It should still work out. Probably?

The other problem, also yarn-related - this batch of Classy is the "old" Classy, so it's scritchier than I would like for next-to-skin wearing. No problem, this sweater's a cardi that I'm omitting buttons on, which essentially forces me to wear another shirt underneath - but is this a summertime sort of piece? If it is, then I'll want to wear short-sleeved tees or tank tops underneath, and would that actually be comfortable with the scritchier yarn? If it's more of a fall or winter piece, then I'll wear tops with longer sleeves underneath it, but they'd have to be not-full-sleeves, because the sweater's sleeves are shortened to something like bracelet length - it would be weird to have the cuffs of my other shirt poking out. Unless I block the cuff ribbing so that it's a straighter fit. Then maybe it would be okay?

So there it is. I'm worried I won't have enough yarn to finish after all, and I'm also worried about the utility of the finished piece. I need to sort those out before I continue putting my time into it.

Maybe I'll just cast on my Thursday Special while I think about it.

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