Is it really Thursday already? (Thank goodness the weekend is coming!) You know, I don’t think I have done a stitch of knitting this week. Maybe one or two rounds of Branden’s sweater before catching my bus Monday, but I can’t remember for sure. Not much, in any case. You see, The Plan is for me to be finished with my thesis research before teaching begins in September. Which means that I need to be working like crazy now. And I have to come up with a curriculum for my fall class. And my undergrad needs my attention. And I am doing a ton of reading about diversity for the teaching circle I’ll be in. Oh, and on Monday? The person I want to postdoc for put up an announcement saying that she’s accepting applications (which means that I should have sent an application 2 weeks ago when I meant to send it, rather than putting it off again…). It’s just been one of those weeks.

So, no knitting. Not even much thinking about knitting, as almost every waking moment has been reading or writing or outlining or scheduling. But things have at least begun to get done, and any craziness now just makes the fall easier. For that reason alone, it’s probably worth it. I really need to not think for a night or two, though. I can only do the every-waking-hour thing for so long, and I think it might have been so long.

Tonight, then, I will be doing some mindless knitting on the hybrid sweater. Yeah, that thing I haven’t talked about in a long, long time. It’s been going. Slowly, but going. The body part of a sweater is good background knitting, but not great blog material. The “look, I made it two whole inches” posts just aren’t that much fun. But I have been making progress, albeit less than I had hoped. I only have about 6″ left, and then I steek. I know I’m supposed to be scared, but I’m mainly just curious, and a little excited. Yay for new things!

The one thing I’m really not sure about is the neck opening. All of my books talk about steeking the armholes, but they don’t say much about the neck. I’m certainly not going to use a straight-across neck with no shaping. That would be really uncomfortable, I’d think. Knitting in the Old Way says that you can steek the neck, too, or you can shape by working back and forth rather than in the round. Wouldn’t steeking the neck mean that you don’t bind off? I thought that the bind off was important for neck structure? (Ask me how I learned that one…) Is it worth it to steek such a small length? This part of the sweater isn’t colorwork, so I could do short row shaping pretty easily. But that might be cheating. This is supposed to be a steeked sweater, knit in the round, after all. I’m not sure what to do about that, but I need to figure it out soon, as there isn’t much time left before the dividing needs to begin. Still, I don’t think I’ll make it there tonight, and tonight I want to not think, and figuring anything out counts as thinking, even if it’s knitting. Maybe tomorrow. Or maybe I’ll just keep knitting and see how steeking a collar works?