Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Yes, I am a geek

The second I saw the pattern for the Big Damn Sweater, I had to knit it. Had to. When I saw Wash wearing it on Firefly, I wanted it. Now some clever people have recreated the pattern from screen shots. Very, very shiny.

As usual when it comes to must-knit-now patterns, nothing in my stash would work. I had to order new yarn. Had to. The 3-ply Fisherman Yarn from Bartlett Yarns is perfect. It's undyed yarn, Light Sheeps Gray, which should show off the cables nicely (guess I'd better learn how to cable). It arrived today and made doing or thinking about anything else very, very difficult.

The Littlest Grinnellian Hoodie

I have a lot of catching up to do. I keep drafting posts in my head but I never get around to actually writing them. Possibly because I keep drafting them in my head when I should be doing other things, or when I'm nowhere near a computer. So I plan on writing a string of posts, more or less broken up by events as they happened, but not necessarily in the same order. I don't think my non-existent readers will mind.

So let's start with some actual knitting. Sadly, I don't have very many knitting projects to my name this past year or so. A pair of socks here, a scarf there. My favorite finished object is a sweater for my college friends' new baby. Well, sort of new baby. He was born in April, and I enthusiastically started the sweater in May. But I have only recently finished it. It wasn't a difficult pattern, so I don't know why it's taken me so long. But at long last, here it is...





The pattern is Pumpkin, by Kim Hargreaves. The yarn is T'ika, from Mirasol Yarn. This was a delicious yarn to knit with -- the softest cotton yarn I've ever touched. I chose red and black because those are the college colors of our alma mater. It was fun to break so far out of the expected baby colors. Why knit baby clothes in pastels anyway? Babies are messy -- they make stains. This sweater will hide them nicely. And people with more experience with babies that I have assure me that the sweater will easily fit the now-nine-month-old with room to grow.