Back is done, front pieces are done, and I'm about 1/3 of the way done both sleeves. I'm knitting them at once, since I've heard it's the way to go. It's a little more challenging keeping the yarn from tangling, but it is nice to be able to have the sleeves end up the same length without madly counting rows all the time.

I still have the blocking to do and the neckband, but it's looking doable. I think I'm going to have to block twice, once before I seam everything up, and once after, just to make it look nice, but it shouldn't take too long. The birthday event I'm hoping to gift this at is Saturday at 5pm, so I've got some time......

GRRRRRRRR!

I was just thinking "Wow, I might actually get this sweater done in time for the birthday this weekend" when disaster struck. The pattern all of a sudden seemed wrong. I was thinking "if I decrease like that, the neck will be on the wrong side of this panel.....oh crap, the panel is BACKWARDS!" That's right folks, I knit half of the front of the sweater BACKWARDS!!! I have two right sides. Even my husband remarked on how quick it is to rip out a piece, compared to the time it takes to knit it up.

So now I have to reknit that whole piece, AND do both sleeves, AND assemble it, block it, and find buttons. This weekend seems awfully close, I'm going to have to be a knitting fool.

A word about Tea.....

I love Tea. I drink it pretty much every single day. (Black with milk and sugar, please) If you haven't already heard of them you should really check out Adiago Tea. They have some of the most amazing tea flavours you'll find. And the coolest Tea Wares for brewing in. (I've never seen a teapot like their IngenuiTEA one - such a cool idea, I bet it works great!)

Adiago Tea Rocks.

I'm making fast progress on the sweater, here is what it looked like last night:

That's abotu 8 inches up the back, it needs to be about 11inches to get to the shoulder shaping, I'm hoping to get to that point today. Cotton on small needles is rough knitting though!

Lots of new yarn for me:

My mom was heading past a yarn shop out of town and I asked her to peek in and see if they had any more of this 'Topacio' Cotton/Acrylic yarn I liked in the sale bin. Well, they had two balls (top right corner) but they also had all this pink and blue cotton/acrylic she figured I'd like, and the purple acrylic that just looked nice :) The pink is already well on it's way to becoming a toddler sweater for my neice. My sister's birthday is in 10 days, I'm trying despirately to finish it in that time. I wish I weren't working with 3.5mm needles, but I think it can still be done. It's mostly stockingknit, so it will be fast, mindless knitting at least.

I finished the socks and did up a matching hat. I tried a square top hat I saw in another blog(Bagatell) but I wasn't thrilled with the end result so I'm going to do a regular rounded top for future baby hats, I think.

I finished that white hat, haven't decided if I'm going to make mitts or booties to go with it yet. Instead I started something else. (gotta get the active projects list into double digits - YAY) I made this sock from some Lion Brand Magic Stripes a friend gave me:

I like this yarn, it knits up nice, and is thicker than most sock yarn so it works up quickly. I think this colourway will be good for a boy, I might make a matching hat once the mate is done.

When you have yarn you like working with (unlike that pink junk used for the last hat I posted about) it seems to fly on the needles. Here's a short stint of knitting from today:
It's destined to be a baby hat, likely with matching socks/booties. The yarn is Bernat Satin, and it's really soft, quite nice to knit with. I'm just knitting a 3x1 rib, it should be stretchy enough to accomodate a range of baby head sizes.

More hats, though I need to get some good "boy" patterns as all the expectant moms I know seem to be having boys. I DO NOT LIKE this yarn (Innovation by Lewiscraft) but I do like the pattern and how it turned out:


It's the Quaker Ribbed HAt shrunk down to a smaller size. It still came out toddler-sized, I was aiming for baby-sized.

I've got a little bit of 3 different purple shades of Look At Me yarn left, I'm going to try and make a hat out of them. One is veregated, I might stripe it with a solid purple. Not sure what to do with the small amount of dark purple I have left, I may skip it if I can make a whole hat out of the other two. Perhaps I can add earflaps with it at the end?