When work is endless (and isn’t it always?), it is nice to occasionally have some finishes on the crafting front to make up for it. This weekend, I unexpectedly had quite a few of them. I’ve had a couple of larger projects tottering slowly along in the background, and suddenly got to that point where a small push would send them racing to the finish line.

I wove about 16″ of plain weave fabric, and sewed up my new phone purse.

I wish the strap were just a couple of inches longer, but otherwise this came out just about perfect. I have plans for several more of these in the future, mostly to play with other designs, but also to coordinate with different outfits.

I spent a couple of hours grafting and knitting an inch of ribbing, and now Branden’s sweater is a few rows (and a good blocking/end weaving) from done:

These always drag on forever in the sleeves, and then somehow I’m shocked when it’s suddenly the end. I do believe I like the stripes after all.

Fortunately, I have something else to keep me busy, now that that’s finished. The embroidered shetland sweater is still moving along nicely:

It’s still small enough to be train knitting, so it’s still getting somewhere. The nice thing about knitting in a fine gauge is that it will stay small enough to be train knitting just that much longer, too.

I pulled out the drum carder the other day, fully intending to card up some more of the brown wool that I bought at Rhinebeck last year, in preparation for whatever project comes out of the garter stitch swatch that I am still pondering over. Somewhere between the carder and the wool I got distracted, though, and ended up carding up some of this instead:

I make no defense of my attention span at the moment. I’m lucky if I can hold a thought long enough to put a sentence together, so don’t have much resistance to the “ooh, shiny” syndrome. The fiber is the dyed top that I bought as seconds from Briar Rose Fibers at Rhinebeck. Most of them were pretty sticky for spinning (hence the seconds), but the fibers themselves weren’t felted together. Nothing that a little carding wouldn’t cure.

And cure it did. I split the fibers up according to color, and then carded like colors into groups. I had 5 batts (about 3.5 oz each) in no time flat, all beautifully fluffy and ready for spinning.

The first batt is already on its way to becoming yarn.

I have no idea what this will become in the end, but I needed a little color after working with the natural yarns, and this is a nice break. I’m spinning it fine, so there should be plenty of yardage to go around in the end.

And, now that that short burst of progress is done, I will retire quietly back into my endless stockinette knitting (with audiobooks), and hopefully there will be something else interesting to show soon. It does feel good to finish something once in a while, though!

I’ve been learning a lot about the academic world in my first year of professoring. Along with many other things, I have learned what to do when faced with a decision: decide to defer decision.

In general, this makes me crazy. After the 45th three hour faculty meeting about some miniscule feature of a campus policy, the discussion leader enthusiastically thanks everyone for the wonderful discussion, and then sums up by saying “well, let’s agree to discuss this at X meeting.” And then the whole cycle starts again.

Much to my horror, I must confess to having made a similar move in my knitting recently. After much dithering about the possible garter stitch scarf/sweater, I couldn’t quite figure out what I wanted. And so, in the guise of allowing the design idea to ripen, I decided not to decide.

Instead, I cast on for this:

That’s the baby shetland sweater destined to be embroidered when it’s off the needles. It’s growing surprisingly quickly for a 300-stitch sweater on size 0 needles, but that’s mostly due to my recent “sky knitting” (a new term for knitting on a plane, which I believe was coined by Ellen and Jan in their recent podcast). The flight to the conference got me through the ribbing, the flight back got me a couple of inches into the body, and then I added another few rows today while sitting in my office clicking through our annual campus sexual harassment training. (You have to click through slide by slide, and then listen while the narrator reads each one to you, and at two minutes each, that adds up to a lot of knitting.) Add to that two more days of department retreat this week, and I might have a sweater by Friday!

I am minimizing my concern at this disturbingly catching indecision by telling myself that the shetland project was in the queue first, and so deserved to be cast on first. Really though, we all know that it’s just a cover for the fact that I’m becoming one of them. Lord save us all. Just do me a favor, and take away my needles when I start giving impassioned speeches over whether I should k1 first and then knit 5 more stitches, or just knit 6 stitches in the first place…

Thanks to a rather large amount of train knitting in the past couple of weeks, I am heading down the finish line on Branden’s second sleeve.

…Which means that I am suddenly realizing that I need to cast on for something else, and fast.

…Especially since I’m going to be traveling this week, and have plane time and airport time and evening hotel time (which is kind of a joke, because I’m going to a conference and the only evening hotel time that happens at conferences for me is the stumble to bed and fall dead asleep kind).

I’ve had a color combination tickling at the back of my mind all through this sweater, though. It came about as a chance association of yarns, piled together next to my chair because I hadn’t yet gotten around to putting them away. (There! A vote for untidiness! If only it made me less twitchy about the state of my office…) The yarns were all piled together by accident, and I made an offhand remark about how they kind of all “went” together. They’ve kind of group-haunted me ever since. But what to do with them?

I have no great ideas. I desperately want to make something complicated, and stylish, and infinitely wearable. Oh, and also? It should require no thought or planning. Dreaming much?

Sometimes, though, the best ideas come to me by way of a blind adventure. I had a vague idea about stripes. And I kind of need some more scarves. (They are daily, year-round wear at work for me, where I huddle over my space heater and curse the air conditioning. Yes, I do need to get a metabolism.)

At first, I wanted lengthwise, wavy stripes. But I couldn’t make it work in my head. So I thought maybe diagonal stripes.

Maybe even going in different directions.

Then I thought about how that could make for interesting sweater geometry.

Then, I cursed myself for being back at sweaters again when what I need is a scarf.

But I like sweaters better. And I like knitting sweaters better. I agonized. And then, I swatched.

I cast on at a corner and just kind of knit as the whim struck me until I had a swatch of a pretty reasonable size (about 10×10″). And now, I have many thoughts.

1) I love the colors together. This will be perfect for something, somehow. And, it uses up leftovers and two deep-stash skeins, which is a bonus.

2) I don’t love garter stitch. Not the knitting of it, nor the wearing of it. Don’t know why; love it on other people, just not usually my thing. But did I mention the colors? And how the garter stitch melds them all together?

3) But garter stitch has no drape (at least not in this fabric), and I don’t want a baggy, unfitted sweater. I know that this is mostly my prejudice speaking, but there it is. I have seen some really beautiful garments in garter stitch, but we just don’t get along. I drew in some ambitious little increases/decreases in the sweater sketch, but have no real idea of how I’d carry those off in the kind of stripes I have drawn. Creative short rows? Black magic? Dunno.

4) Would I even have enough yarn? The answer is no, but I could in theory spin some more. Would have to, in fact, as the dark brown yarn is just a teensy bit too heavy to play nicely with the other yarns, and yet it really must be in there.

5) I love, love, love the swatch. But I also can’t help thinking of it as a dishrag. (I think that’s the garter stitch talking.) I do not wish to wear a dishrag, either as a sweater or as a scarf.

6) The motif is rather modern, and could perhaps be stylish if done well. It could also be a complete train wreck with a billion ends to weave in (26 in the swatch alone). Big, bold, geometric motifs are also not usually my thing, though I do admit to occasionally loving them from afar.

7) I am far more intrigued by the idea of knitting this as a sweater, but I really do need a scarf.

In the end, I am no closer to arriving at a decision and a plane knitting project than when I started. But I do have a rather lovely dishrag swatch.

What do you think should become of it?

This has been a good week for crafts. Two day-long “faculty retreats” meant that I got to spend some time at work knitting. Usually I don’t knit in meetings at work, but when it’s two 8 hour days back to back with much talk and few results, knitting just makes me a better person to be around. I finished a sock that’s been languishing in my UFO pile for 2 years now:

This is the second sock, so I now have a new pair ready for next fall. It’s just a very simple foot with a twist stitch rib at the cuff, which is thick and cushy and very elastic.

I also knit away on a sweater sleeve for Branden’s Blue Eyes sweater. I’m about 10 inches into the first sleeve now…only 15 left to go!

In the evenings, I’ve been playing with band weaving, using my new tablet loom. I started out with a very simple, narrow band, just to get a feel for the technique.

It’s about the width of a shoelace, and was mostly just me fidgeting around with making different patterns and figuring out how to use the tablets.

Once that was off the loom, it was on to more challenging things.

This is the band that I’ll actually use for my phone purse. It was much more difficult to warp because of the way the colors were arranged, but it’s still pretty easy to weave, and it’s something that I simply could not do with my 4-shaft loom. The band has 88 threads in it, and is about an inch wide and very thick, perfect for use as a strap. The tablet weaving makes a completely different structure than a regular shaft loom, which I will need to remember to write about sometime when I have closeup pictures to show.

These are a couple of the other patterns possible with this warp threading; there is always so much variation to play with in weaving.

The weaving goes pretty fast once I get into the rhythm of it, so my phone should have a much fancier home to live in soon.

Let me introduce you to my newest tool: a tablet/inkle loom.

Now, you might think that a new loom is the last thing that I really need, since I’ve had so little time to spend crafting lately. And you’d be right.

But, as always happens with crafting, one thing leads to another, and last week I broke down and bought a tablet loom.

It all started last summer, when I bought a phone too big to fit in the pocket of any clothes I own:

I needed a way to carry it around, and so whipped up a quilted phone purse to fit (I don’t know if it’s possible to buy a simple phone purse in the appropriate size now, but it wasn’t last summer when I last looked).

Well. After less than a year of use, it looks like this:

The fabric hasn’t held up at all, and quite frankly, it’s looking pretty ratty. Clearly, I need another phone purse.

It occurred to me that weaving might be a better way to tackle this particular problem, since it’s easy to weave a 4″ strip of fabric, and it will be a heavier material that will stand up better to wear. So, I set about thinking up a woven design. But I didn’t really want to weave the strap on my regular loom. I started thinking about weaving bands, which I’ve never really explored before. This is where I got myself into trouble.

After a couple of Youtube videos, I could suddenly begin to see the advantages of inkle and tablet looms, where the warp threads are manually manipulated and so give you a lot more pattern flexibility than the 4-shaft loom that I have here. (Of course, you can do manual manipulation on a shaft loom, too, but that’s really not what it’s optimized for. And, well…shiny new toy, and all that.) And so, bit by bit, I edged closer to trying out a new weaving technique.

I read some blogs. I watched a bunch of videos. I bought some books. And then, of course, I bought a loom.

Earlier this week, Branden made me some tablets on the laser cutter at the local hackerspace. Two old cereal boxes, and I have more tablets than I’ll need anytime soon.

I started weaving up a thin band, just to play a bit with the technique and see how it works.

I still need to find time to sit down and try some of the more complicated (i.e. exciting) designs, but it’s a start. The problem – and the beauty – of crafting is that every project has the potential to turn into another rabbit hole, destined to send you hurtling along paths you never knew existed or never intended to follow. It will be interesting to see where this one leads.

In other news, I have finally finished the body on Branden’s sweater, and just cast off at the hem last night. It is 29″ from shoulder to hem. Only two sleeves left to go!

As of last Friday, my first year of teaching is done. Students are graduated, grades are in. There are (of course and always) a few loose ends to tie up for this semester, but the most active part is finished.

I am exhausted.

I’ve pushed harder than I really could afford to push all year, and then I’ve been pushed farther by a department hungry for service. I wish I could say that the year ended with triumph at graduation, but really it was more of a falling over the finish line, gasping for breath. By all accounts, it was a successful year, but making it so has taken a lot out of me. (The fact that I’ve been too tired to knit for most of a month says a lot about just how much.)

Next week (as in tomorrow), I have three students starting in my research lab to work over the summer, so this past week was my only chance to recover a bit before diving back in. I ended up having to go in to work for two days of the five (sigh), but other than that I stayed home and did not much of anything.

I spun up a couple more skeins for the embroidered shetland sweater. I knit a few more inches on the body of Branden’s Blue Eyes sweater. There is hope that I will one day reach the end of it. I finished up the weaving on some tea towels to make room on the loom for new projects. And, yesterday, we spent all day finishing the landscaping in the back yard. Just the plants left to add, now.

Mostly, though, I kind of wandered around aimlessly and worked on projects when they happened to fall into my hands. I don’t have the brain power yet to be creative and think of new projects, though by Friday I was starting to see some glimmer of hope that it might return someday. I can’t say that I’m back on my feet quite yet, and I’m really not ready to start all over again tomorrow, but at least the pause let me catch my breath a little bit before the rush begins again.

I knew this year would be hard, and I intentionally cleared everything else from my schedule to make room for it. There were no ambitious projects, no outside activities. Simple stockinette with no deadlines, and no projects that required a lot of thought. There’s a time to buckle down and focus, and this year needed to be it. Next year is the year where I need to find some kind of balance, or (more probably) some kind of off-balance oscillation that allows me to exist outside of work for at least some portion of the year. I hope that means more time for crafting, among other things.

I have to say that I am looking at the ever-increasing list of things added to my workload for next year and wondering how on earth this is really going to happen, but I’m sure that somehow there must be a way. Hopefully the summer will be a place to work on that a bit, since most of the work for the summer months is long-term projects and building foundations for next year. These, at least, are things that depend on me alone, where I can set the pace. The list of things to do is overwhelming any way that I look at it, but at least the schedule will be my own and there will be fewer interruptions and emergencies from external sources (I hope). In the meantime, I fished a lingering UFO out of the closet to become my purse knitting this week, and I might just be able to reclaim my commuting space for knitting over the next few months.

So, yeah. Not much crafting at the moment, but at least a hope that there will be space for more soon. Yay for summer!

There hasn’t been a lot of knitting progress lately. The Blue Eyes sweater is slowly growing:

And this week I managed to ply off a couple of skeins of the oatmeal yarn for the next Shetland sweater:

Mostly, though, I’ve been working late, attending end-of-year campus events, and getting distracted by the nice weather outside.

The daffodils opened last week, and we have quite a happy display by the front fence now:

Then, the tulips began to make an appearance. (We just added the grape hyacinths today. I love grape hyacinths.)

And this week, our front yard has turned purple with violets. I am so glad that there are some out there; I had been thinking how perfect this yard would be for violets, but they take several years to really establish themselves. Fortunately, it seems that someone before me thought to add a few to the front yard, and now there are millions of them, and it seems that there are more every day.

While all of that is going on in the front yard, we’ve been moving mountains in the back yard, too. When we moved into this house last August, one of the big downsides to the property was the fact that the back yard was, quite literally, a sheet of astroturf held down by some red tiles. It doesn’t get a lot of sun, and apparently the landlords decided that they were tired of dealing with a lack of grass. So, they covered everything in mulch and landscaping cloth, and added a touch of green with a 10’x30′ patch of plastic grass. To their credit, they did a really professional job of laying the landscaping cloth and the mulch, and the whole yard was nicely done. But, astroturf.

Usually, I’m ok with things that are simply functional, but in this case, it made my gardeners’ heart weep. So, this spring we asked them if they’d mind if we did some (pretty major) landscaping. They said to go ahead and do whatever we wanted to do. (Have I mentioned that I really like our new landlords?)

I’ve been plotting and planning all spring, and for the last month we’ve spent almost all of our weekend time digging holes, filling those same holes with a ton and a half (no kidding) of rock, renting a plate compactor, learning to lay tiles properly, and installing in a trellis fence along the back edge of the garden. It’s far from finished, but it’s getting there. We installed a small patio for sitting, and another to hold the new grill. Then, we put in landscape edging to make some strong lines, and last weekend we started laying out the raised bed. Today, we filled it with soil, and we bought our second big round of plants.

This will be a mix between an herb and a flower bed; a few flowers and a lot of foliage plants to add green and texture to the yard. There’s a hibiscus for the center, and a couple of colors of begonia for a ring around it, with nettles, white licorice, sage, thyme, rosemary, cilantro, parsley, and a few others I forget at the moment, for an easy-access herb ring around the outside. We’ll need to go somewhere else to find savory and tarragon, and the basil and oregano will come after the last frost date. It promises to be a flavorful garden, though!

Most of the plants will get put in the ground in a week or two, probably, since there are a few that are frost-tender and we’re not quite out of the woods here just yet. But it’s a start, and the yard is actually starting to feel like a garden now that the plants are all sitting there in the middle of the bed. That was a 4-foot high heap of dirt this morning, and it feels really good to see progress every weekend. We still have a couple more panels of trellis to install, lots of planting to do, and we still need to finalize the garden path and install some more landscape edging, but it’s coming. And, if you ignore the huge piles of tools still sitting around the yard, this view from the patio is starting to actually look like a yard you might want to spend time in.

We poached those hosta plants from my grandfathers’ yard a few weeks ago, since his were in serious need of dividing. There are bleeding heart bulbs in behind the hosta, and calladium bulbs in the front. No signs of life yet, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed that they’re coming soon. There are also some lily of the valley planted off on the side that I’m impatiently waiting to see poking up. I wasn’t too sure about the quality of those bulbs, so it’s hard to know if they’re really coming, but I hope so.

It’ll be a few more weeks before we have everything tidied up and settled, but it’s been fun to see it coming along, and it will be even more fun to have a nice place to spend time outside this summer. Who knows…I might even manage to knit out there once in a while…

I took a break from knitting Branden’s sweater last week to do a little spinning in preparation for the next project. I have some Shetland lambswool in a beautiful oatmeal color, that has been just dying for a project to go with it.

I bought the fiber at Greencastle about a year ago now, (was that only a year ago??), intending for it to be a sweater for Branden, but lately it’s been calling my name instead. Last week, I  spun up a couple of bobbins of singles, but then couldn’t decide whether I wanted a 2 or a 3-ply. So I did something unusual for me (in spinning, at least). I actually spun up a sample of yarn!

(I know…it’s just like a swatch, and I don’t know why I never do it, but for whatever reason I just don’t. Until now….)

The two yarns were plied from the same singles; a slightly high twist three-ply on the left, and a lower twist two-ply on the right. The weights came out almost identical for the two yarns, which I’m attributing to the higher twist in the three ply. They also came out beautifully elastic, which is something that I have been working at for a long time and have only gotten with my last couple of spinning samples. Fiber prep really is everything.

Tonight, I knit up a swatch. It’s a rather narrow swatch, because I didn’t make as much 3-ply as I thought I did. Still, it was enough to tell me what I needed to know.

Here, the 2-ply is on the left and the 3-ply is on the right, and the join is marked by that little yarn tail poking up toward the top of the frame. I knit both yarns on the same needle, and despite the apparent similarity of weight in the skein, the 3-ply is definitely heavier. It’s hard to see a definite difference in the stitches themselves, but there’s a huge difference in the feel of the fabric. The three ply is cushy and thick, like you’d want for socks or a heavy winter sweater. The 2-ply is lighter and has better drape, possibly because of gauge differences between the two weights of yarn. I’m thinking of a light, spring/summer cardigan this time, so 2-ply it is.

This will be the epitome of mindless knitting; a simple, classic cardigan in a very plain color at a very fine gauge. But at the end, I have something much more fun in mind.

In this case, the sweater is just a canvas for some embroidered accents. I’ve been wanting to mix embroidery with knitting for some time now, and had just never gotten around to it. Last Friday, I pulled out some linen and did some “sketching” in stitches. The central motif there is probably pretty close to the final idea, and then there are some smaller accent flowers and some practice leaves off on the side, just testing how different kinds of stitches work with the yarn that I’m using for embroidery thread.

It’s an awful lot of knitting to support a pretty tiny detail, but I think it’s going to work out well. And a lot of knitting is never a problem, right?

I am sure that everyone has by now heard every last detail of the things going on in Boston this week. It seems that it’s everywhere you look. For those that I haven’t already been in contact with, we are both fine, and our families are fine, and we know of no one in even our extended circles that was injured, despite a few close calls.

Of course, watching from the sidelines doesn’t make things any easier. There have been two days this week where I have sat at home, unable to go to work because the city is shut down due to violence. It’s been a cloud that hangs heavy over this busiest time of the semester, and a time that should be celebratory, as our seniors prepare to go off into the world.

In a way, having those enforced periods of stillness has made things more difficult. And yet, it has given me more time to process. There are so many thoughts and emotions to be sorted through in the aftermath of something like this. These are just a few of the things that I have been feeling, in no particular order:

anger – That someone would choose to do such a thing, and that there are people out there who intentionally foster the mindset that leads to this kind of action.

awe – That onlookers responded so generously, risking life and limb (quite literally) to save strangers in the aftermath. Humanity is a wonderful thing. That the health care and law enforcement systems were prepared to step up, move quickly and effectively, and make sure that the situation was stabilized and contained as quickly as possible. There are many heroes in this story.

gratitude – That we live in a time and a place where acts like this are rare enough to be big news. There are many people in the world who are not so lucky.

complicity – I believe that we make the world we live in, and the presence of such horror speaks to a gaping hole in our global community that I do not know how to fill, and to hurts that I don’t know how to heal. But even in our ignorance and pursuit of day-to-day happiness, we are complicit if we hide our eyes. We cannot just shake our heads and say we don’t understand how “they” can do such things. “We” are part of “they,” and in this case “they” were two of “us.” It is imperative that each of us find ways to take responsibility onto ourselves for healing this hurt.

hope – The fact that we are a part of it means that we have the power to change, if we can only figure out how. We have the power to move on, and the strength to make sure that we turn this horror into an impetus for positive change.

sadness – At the hurt that caused this to happen, and all of the hurt that it has created.

resilience – It is springtime. Trees are blooming, flowers are pushing their way up through the frozen, stony ground. Even when things look bleak, life continues. It will burst back joyful and vibrant, with time.

fortunate – Despite knowing several people who were at the marathon (standing in those very spots) earlier in the day, or who had planned to go and were kept home by their studies, and despite the fact that my sister lives 3 blocks from yesterday’s drama, no one I know is hurt. Considering the crowds and the importance of this event in this city, it is a small miracle that there were so few who were gravely injured or killed. In the scope of tragedies of this sort, the damage from this one was (relatively!) small. An hour or two earlier, and the number of injuries would have been much larger.

impatience – I wish I knew what I could do to help. The usual things (give blood, give money, etc.) seem trite and inconsequential in the face of this. I want to know how we can make deep and lasting change that ensures that we will build a community where this will not happen again.

dread  – I cringe at the thought of the days and weeks to come. The anger that now has an outlet, the sadness that will be seeking explanation. The slow, careful searching for a justice that will not change the facts or heal the pain of loss. I am revulsed by the bigotry that I have already seen, and wince at the vengeance that some people feel is the only answer. I also know that this is a normal part of recovery, but I dread the ugliness of it, on top of the rest.

pity – I know pity is sometimes considered a bad word, but I don’t mean this in a condescending sort of way. I feel pity for a life that has led two young men to this. Whatever its twists and turns, it cannot have been a happy one.  I also feel pity for their family, who have just watched two of their loved ones hunted down, suddenly lost both of them forever, and are also grappling with the shock of their guilt. Our need to explain and understand must be nothing compared to theirs.

I am sure that I will continue to cycle through all of these emotions (and more) as things continue to unfold. I don’t know where the answers lie, or even where to start trying to find them. But, as with all large tasks, you just have to take it one step at a time, one day at a time. And there is work to be done.

This week was cold, wet, and gray, surely the kind that lies at the origin of the “April showers bring May flowers” adage – an attempt to see hope in the midst of the blah. And so far, cold or no, the showers seem to be working (and even ahead of schedule). It seems like we have a new flower a day in the front yard right now. On Monday, these little blue stars made an appearance (I forget what they’re called, but I do remember planting them).

And then somewhere around Wednesday, the buds on the earliest tulips burst into color. They’ve only just opened this morning, so I’m hoping they’ll be around for a good while yet.

The daffodils are up and growing by leaps and bounds. Their buds are also starting to swell, so we should have a pretty party by the front fence in a couple of weeks.

The back yard is now home to quite a lot of mud, after a week of rain. We’ve gotten rid of (most of) the astroturf now, and have dug the holes that we’ll fill with a base for the new patio. We made a trip to the landscaping store this morning, and there will be 1.3 tons of gravel in our driveway on Monday, ready for schlepping. By the time the patio is in, it will be time to fill the back yard with flowers, too. I can’t wait!

In the meantime, I’ve also been getting a fair bit of knitting done. Branden’s Blue Eyes sweater made good train knitting for the beginning of the week while it was small, but had outgrown my work bag by Wednesday. Note to self: I need to come up with another train project for next week!

It’s been going steadily along at home in the evenings, though, and I’m now a few inches past the sleeve split.

That section just before the sleeve split is always the slowest part in a top-down raglan. The neck shaping goes so fast, and then you get into those endless, endless rows that go all the way around the widest part of the chest and over the longest part of the sleeve all at the same time. It’s such a relief to get back to the main body section and put a third of the stitches onto holders.

I can’t decide how I feel about the colors. In detail, they are spot on, and from far away I like how they pattern is coming out. At each point in the yarn, I like the way the colors combine. And yet, somehow, the magic isn’t there. This colorway doesn’t move me the way some of my dye experiments do. It’s right in all of the particulars, and yet that technical accuracy doesn’t translate into an aggregate that I love. Needs more gray and less brown, I think. The brown was supposed to be a highlight, but in this combination it turned out to be a pretty strong, dominant color. It could also use a bit more of the darker gray-blue.

I like it well enough, though, and Branden likes the colors, which is what matters. And, if I put some of my unconscious expectations aside, it is a rather nice yarn working up into a pretty good sweater. I think it will grow on me in the end.

I do like how the three different plies kind of fade in and out of the yarn. For a while, green will be dominant, then the blue, then the turquoise and gray. The yarn is constantly shifting and changing, which makes it fun to knit with, and the marled yarn gives the colors a dappled look and a depth that I like a lot.

The fabric itself makes me think of an impressionist painting, with little flecks of color here and there adding up to a sum that is somehow different than all its individual parts.

I’m on skein 3 out of 12, so I should definitely have enough yarn to finish the sweater, and perhaps more besides.

Shockingly, the fact that I am past the sleeve split means that it’s time to start thinking about the next project already (especially considering the note about train knitting, above). I thought I’d have a while before I’d have to think up anything new, and here I find myself already needing to start thinking of the next thing. Unfortunately, I don’t have a whole lot lined up and waiting, and with end-of-semester brain it will probably take a while to come up with the next project. I had one plan all worked up, and then there was a snafu with the yarn I was going to spin, and I need to find something else. I’m getting a tiny little tickle in the back of my mind about some baby shetland from Greencastle, but that also needs to be spun before it can be knit.

So we’ll see. I think that there will be some spinning of new yarn, and maybe it’s time for a stash toss to see what’s in there that might stand in for a quick project in the meantime. Only one more month until the end of semester, and then there might be space for the design juices to start flowing again. Soon!