One New Sweater After Another

As a distraction from sewing together the sweaters recently loomed, there has been a lot of crocheting going on around here.  I found the purple Soft Serve sweater that has been about half completed for months and thought about working on it.  I just looked at an old post and discovered that I started crocheting that purple Soft Serve in the fall of 2012, so that poor UFO was older than I thought. In order to refresh my memory of the pattern I decided to use up the leftover yarn from the latest afghan, the mint green color, to make a fast bolero version.  There seemed to be most of a one-pound skein left and surely that would be enough to crochet a bolero-type sweater, right?  Not if you change your mind and crochet a regular cardigan, then have to go buy another skein of yarn, use that up and have to buy another, ending up with just as much leftover yarn as you started with.  Stash busting it was not.  And this sweater weighs over two pounds.

In spite of the weight, it is a very cozy and comfortable cardigan and will be great for the cold winter mornings.  I used backwards crochet to finish off the border edges.

Even though it took longer than I thought it would, this did make me work on the purple version, and I managed to finish that off this morning but haven't taken any pictures of it yet.  The purple version has ties instead of buttons.

Sweaters in March

There is a burst of knitting activity going on this month so far.  It's a lot faster to whip up a pullover than a cardigan.  Now all the assembly of the pieces has to happen.

 The picture above shows the pieces of the new pullovers.  The picture below shows a better representation of the true colors of the purple and the pink sweaters.

The pink sweater has a round neckline and all the rest will be V-neck pullovers.  There is also a yellow cardigan that needs its buttons.

These should look a lot better than  my old frayed sweatshirts for working around the house.

Update:  My sister was down for a visit and to go with us to Stitches West, so I had her try on the round-yoke cardigan.  It looked so much better on her than on me that it was soon on its way with its new owner.  I learned a lot making it but it just wasn't comfortable on me.

Pullovers!

The ribbings for a purple pullover had been finished for several months, and I had the back already hanging from the machine, but then came the holidays and I forgot it.  The poor ribbing got all stretched out of shape so I took it off the machine and knit a new one. Now the basic knitting of the sweater pieces is almost finished.

 Above is the back hanging from the LK150.  I am really loving this machine.  It knits the worsted weight yarn like a champ and is so easy to use.

This is a dark and overcast day here in sunny California, so the above picture is pretty bad, but you can see that the front, back and one sleeve are done.  I have already put in a book-on-tape of Sense and Sensibility so will shortly go into the sewing room and finish up the second sleeve. 

I got distracted from the light blue empire pullover because it is a little too dark in the sewing room for dropping stitches and picking them back up to create the pattern I want on the yoke portions, so I am knitting plain sweaters for now until the sun comes back.  Also started are a pink pullover and a delft blue pullover.

Lots of leftover yarn is starting to accumulate here and there in the sewing room, so I'll have to think of some project to use it up.  Not an afghan, though, because I am all crocheted out for the time being.

Four New Sweaters

This was UFO week.  I sewed on so many buttons this week that I will be making pullovers for awhile until I can face a button again.  However, I now have 4 more sweaters. 

The first cardigan I decided to finish off was the navy jacket.  While I was on a roll, I finished the green cardigan jacket with the eyelet borders:

 

 

Then it was the raglan variegated cardigan:

 It seemed at first that it would be hard to find buttons that would go with this busy yarn, but I found some excellent ones at Beverly's.

I always thought that raglans didn't look good on me, but now I have changed my mind.  If the sleeves are 3/4 length and the seams are slightly fitted, the sweater looks very good.  It certainly is easier to sew in raglan sleeves than set-in sleeves.

The last sweater was the fair isle cardigan.  It's nice that this is finally done, but I don't think I'll make any more round yoke sweaters because I don't like the fit on me and how the yoke feels.  I'd like to try more fair isle though.

I'm almost ready to hang the light blue pullover on the machine.  It will be great to finish off a sweater without buttons.

Midwinter Knitting

Well, time has been flying along and here it is a new year already.  Here in California, we are having a very cold but dry winter so far.  Those completely sewn-together sweaters have been making me feel guilty, so one of the first things I am going to try to finish up this January is getting the buttons sewn onto the three cardigans.  I even wore the navy cardigan jacket once with a fancy pin holding the top together, so that is the one I decided to work on first.

 

I think I will get a lot of use out of this sweater because it has a classic shape and 3/4 sleeves.

 

 

The emerald green sweater jacket is the same pattern but has eyelets in the borders just like the pink jacket I made last year (which I happen to be wearing right this minute).  I didn't get the button positions marked  yet, but at least it is out of the stack of unfinished items and ready to work on.  Both of these colors will be very useful.  I have been making an effort this winter to wear my sweaters more often instead of just finishing them and putting them in a drawer.

The current project is a pullover sweater (will not languish unfinished waiting for its buttons) from this book:

I am using the stitch pattern and my TNT sweater pattern, and the finished pullover will have 3/4-length sleeves.  One thing I have discovered is that it is very hard to knit a lace pattern and watch some of my favorite Korean dramas at the same time, because I lose my place in the pattern when I look up to read the subtitles.

The lace portions will be knitted by hand and then hung on the machine for the rest of the bodices and sleeves.

Sock Knitting Again

I like to try different sock yarns, so this time I was using some Kroy that was in the stash.  I was a little alarmed when I read that the yardage was only 166 yards for each ball of yarn since I thought that around 400 yards was needed to make two socks.  This was a very stressful sock knit because it looked like there would not be enough yarn.  I barely had enough yarn, and there is not that extra little bit left to do any major mending needed in the future, so I think I will stick with other brands from now on.  My daughter is rather petite with a small foot, so I don't think you could have enough yarn to make a man's sock at all without using more than one skein per sock and having to weave in ends in the body of the sock.  It also seemed like the yarn in one of the skeins was thicker than the yarn in the second skein.  Anyway, I did manage to get two nice socks out of it:

Here's all the yarn I had left from the second sock with a dime beside it for reference:

It's finally getting cooler now, at least in the mornings and evenings though the days can climb to the 90's.  Time to start finishing up my sweaters and making new ones.

Finally, A Finished Object

Too bad the color of this afghan doesn't seem to photograph very well because it looks so  much better in person.  There are several shades of pink and one variegated yarn with a pop of orange.  It is a nice lap-sized blanket.  I was really really tired of working on it by the end, though. The mint green yarn was a little hard to crochet, but it did wash up nicely.

 I finally went with a simple shell edging which looks pretty good.  This was the first time I have used the 'crochet-it-together-as-you-go' method, and it sure is better than hand sewing all the motifs together.

My unfinished sweater inventory is getting bigger since it is still too hot to have a lap full of sweater, so at present I have three sweaters that need buttons and one sweater to sew together, and about three sets of ribbings ready to be made into sweaters.