Sweater Weather

There's definitely a nip of fall in the air this week. Welcome relief after the hot and sticky weather that we had over Labor Day weekend. It might not be a bad idea to sort through my sweaters and see which ones could use a little freshening up. I will never publicly admit to how many sweaters are in my closet. It's kind of a uniform thing. Jeans--or khakis--tee shirt--short-sleeved or long, and a sweater. Add Crocs, Borns, or Tevas, and I'm set. How fashion forward.

St. Brigid is on the needles. When I did my gauge swatch a few weeks ago, I was able to get the best gauge with a #5 needle, but as I started knitting up the back this week, it became obvious that it was going to end up being way too over-sized for me. I started over with #3 needles, and I think this is going to be much better. My concerns about having a bulletproof sweater don't seem to be an issue.

The first few rows in a new cable project are always the toughest. You can't see the pattern yet, and you're not too sure what all those symbols are telling you to do. It always helps me to make cheat sheets. Once I've copied the graphs, I cut them out and tape them all to one sheet of paper along with the key for the symbols. I put them on my magnet sheet and into the sleeve of a page protector, and I'm ready to go. I've even gotten into the habit of making spreadsheets so that I know which row I should be knitting for each cable pattern on any given row in the sweater. This is especially helpful when the cable patterns have a different number of rows in the repeat of the pattern--which is the case in almost every cabled project I've ever knit. Once I've taken the time to do this prep work, it's about as mindless as I can make it. Now that I've gotten through the entire repeat for almost the second time on, the knitting is going much faster, and I can actually talk to my husband and/or watch TV simultaneously. The cables have a new twist (sorry) this time, too. Stitches are increased and decreased at the beginning a again at the end of the repeat. I wish I could dream up this stuff. I guess I should just be grateful that I can at least reproduce someone else's creativity. On with the KAL!