Knitting: The End is Near

No, I'm not standing on a street corner with a sandwich board sign, and this is not the movie 2012.  I am THIS close to being done with the Classic Lines Cardigan.  In fact, by the time you read this, I may already be done.

As I mentioned in my food post on Monday, my family was marvelous on the holiday weekend and let me have run of the livingroom TV for almost the entire weekend.  And I went nuts.  By the time I caught up with my backlog of "Caprica" episodes (Eric Stoltz has aged well, yum) I had joined the sleeves to the body and begun the raglan decreases.  Amusingly, my next show was the latest episode of "Fringe" where Walter goes to an alternate universe where "Back to the Future" starring Eric Stoltz is playing.

Aparently he was originally cast in the role, but focus groups didn't like him.  Can you imagine the classic lines with him in the role?  Boggles the mind.

At the end of "Lost" last night, I had not only finished the raglan decreases on the sleeves, and knit the collar band and sewn it down, I had picked up and knit the right side band and knit the turning row for it.

Actually I probably would have been done with it at that point in time if I hadn't waffled so much about the STEEKING.

I am expecting the exterminator tomorrow, so I had taken down my sewing table and sewing machine so I'd have room to pull all my pots, pans and dishes out of the cupboards.  I did NOT want to hand-sew the reinforcements for the steeks, and my machine was unavailable.  After waffling, procrastinating, and whinging for a half an hour, I finally said to myself that the yarn stuck to itself so much while I was knitting, it will stick together without reinforcing stitches.

So far, I was right.  I'm not going to be shoving it into a project bag and taking it down to the bus stop tomorrow morning though.  I'm not that stupid.

So next week I expect to be reporting to you how many squares I've gotten done on the New Traditions Afghan kit.

Knitting: Oh come on already...

The Knit Picks Classic Lines Cardigan has killed my will to knit.  Before it was just a suspicion, now it's confirmed.  In my spring cleaning frenzy, I was going through my yarn stash, trying to bring some kind of order to it by sorting into space bags by yarn weight or putting the kits in a separate location, and I caught myself wistfully sighing over  a handbag kit.  Clearly, I wanted to knit.  I did NOT want to knit further on that cardigan, though.  I don't know why... it's a cute sweater.  I'm doing it in my favorite colors.  Maybe it's a combination of counting rounds for the stripes (six rounds apart) and counting rounds between increases and decreases (seven rounds apart).  It's annoying.  Sure, I can do it in my head without fancy gadgets, or count from my last one, but it's so *irritating* that for my particular size, the counts for the two are one round off.  It seems to me a decent designer could create a pattern that doesn't KILL the joy of knitting.

During my stash-tossing (rotating the stash around, NOT throwing anything away, lol) I found and set aside my Mr. Foster and his outfits kit, and the Carmen Banana kit.  I am determined to find the joy in knitting again, and what better way than cute, dressable knit toys?  Size 1 and 3 needles though... sigh.

Maybe I need to find a bulky project.