Three BSJs in One Week...

...AAAA-hahahahahaha! Yeah, that didn't work so much.

Husband and I took a long road trip the first two weeks of August. And when I say "long road trip," I don't mean New-England-long, wherein driving for three hours is "SOOO FAAAARRRRR!" No, when we take road trips, we take road trips. 2,800+ miles in thirteen days. VT-NYC-DC-ATL-DC-VT. A real road trip.

We stopped in DC twice, on the way down for several days to visit Knitting Queen and several college friends who live in the DC area, and then again on the way up because some of those same friends were having a housewarming party and it was a good chance to see even more people I haven't seen since college. And, of course, since we're all at that almost-thirty time in life, everybody's having babies. Three different couples in DC are currently pregnant or have just given birth. In fact, one of those three couples had their baby during the week of our trip.

Three babies = three Baby Surprise Jackets.

I thought it was an ambitious-but-possibly-reasonable goal to work towards making all three BSJs during the first week of our trip. And, y'know, if I didn't get one of them done in the first week, I could definitely work on it while we were in Atlanta, and then do the gifting on our way back home. Right? Right.

Right.

First BSJ (the red one) took three separate cast-on attempts, which was most of our drive through the Adirondacks. That's almost six hours right there. Of just casting on. I didn't knit in NYC nearly as much as I thought I would, and the ball of 220 Superwash got really tangled in my purse and took nearly a day to untangle and re-roll.

(I did have an enjoyable subway moment, when the two young women sitting across from me in the subway car eyed me with envy as I was knitting, and then turned their conversation to dreams of what they'd like to knit someday -- if they ever actually bothered to pick up the needles. It was quite a hilarious situation, but contributed significantly to a need-t0-unknit-a-few-rows moment, which then started the oh-crap-what-a-tangled-mess phenomenon. That's what I get for gloating.)

I finally made some good progress on the red BSJ as we drove down the Garden State Parkway to DC/Baltimore. Finished it in DC, except for the sewing-the-shoulder-seams, and promptly lost it under stuff in the back seat of the car.

The second (blue) BSJ, I cast on somewhere between DC and Durham, NC, where we spent the night with some other college friends. I did much of the casting-on and knitting-up so much better the second time around... except that I accidentally cast on 155 stitches rather than 160, and didn't realize it until I was halfway through. I was NOT frogging several days worth of my work at this point (there was still one more BSJ to go, remember!), so I just reworked the math and kept going. But the extra math meant extra thinking for every row (wait, do I increase here, or do I increase there? How many stitches am I supposed to have on each side of the marker? How big should I make that middle section whose stitches I pick up later? ARGH).

I did not finish the blue BSJ by the time we got back up to DC on the homeward stretch of our journey. I didn't even finish it by the time we got back to Vermont, because I insisted on driving the whole way from Philadelphia to Burlington (at some point, my need to be in control of the car trumped my desire to finish the darn sweater). I finished the blue BSJ about ten days after we got home, because I wanted the needles so I could get started on the sleeve of the Minimalist Cardigan -- the night before I was taking off on my next trip. I finished the knitting, but not the shoulder seams, about 1 a.m. With a 6 a.m. flight the next day. Sigh.

One more BSJ to go. I kind of can't handle it right now, though, and want to finish my Minimalist Cardigan first. Looks like I'll need to knit the third (green) one on size 8s rather than on7s, and send that one to the biggest baby of the three.

BTW, on size 7s, one BSJ takes about a ball and a half of Cascade 220 Superwash. At some point, I'll likely make a stripey fourth BSJ out of the remainders. In spite of all the pressure I put on myself to do a bunch of the same sweater again and again (which could easily lead to me hating the pattern), I still adore the BSJ and will probably make a zillion more over the course of my lifetime.

WIP Wednesday: Tangled Yoke Cardigan

The "WIP Wednesday" thing is a bit gimmicky, but whatever.

I bought a giant cone of anonymous wool sport/DK-weight yarn at Vermont Sheep and Wool this September, $15 for 2250 yards! It's brown with a gray halo, well-spun (2-ply) but not thoroughly washed, so full of lanolin. I think I like that, but it's a little bit weird to have two lightly-waxed fingertips on each hand.

Usually when I buy yarn, I sometimes have a vague idea of what I want to do with it.... but I'm not one of those people who has the self-discipline to buy specific yarn for a specific project and that's it. I buy stash yarn, and then knit from my stash. But with this yarn, I knew exactly what it was for: the Tangled Yoke Cardigan from Fall 2007 Interweave Knits.

I began working on a sleeve during a three-day conference/continuing-ed retreat at the end of September, and got about 8 inches done. Perfect gauge, first try, no fiddling at all. Love it. I also love going to three-day-long meetings where it’s okay to knit and learn things at the same time. The world needs to be like that more often. I also went to Boston the next week for an overnight and did a bit of subway knitting while I was there.

I made little progress until the end of October/beginning of November, when an unexpected family funeral gave me two five-hour-or-so plane rides to fill, and I got both sleeves done and the first couple of inches of the body started.

Then I took a month-and-a-half break. I had a couple of smaller projects I needed/wanted to do for Christmas (like socks), and Christmas is generally a busy time for pastors anyway. BUT... two days after Christmas, I was back at it. I spent several days knitting seriously (particularly New Years Eve and Day, when we watched three or four movies in a row and I didn't change out of my pjs that whole time), and within the first week of the new year I had the body done, the sleeves attached, and about 2" of yoke completed.

And this is where I had to admit to myself that, well, the cable chart looks kind of scary. I wanted to do a more challenging cable than I'd done before, but still. I was feeling a bit nervous. I'm also well aware that looks can be deceiving when it comes to knitting, and the chart's bark was probably worse than its bite. I was intimidated, but figured I'd just have to get over it.

I was right.

Something wasn't right in my counting in the decrease row, so the set-up row of the chart took me forever. I had to keep ripping and reknitting these two rows several times -- two Gene Kelley/Fred Astaire movies back-to-back, and all I had to show for my time was those two rows. But they are well-done rows, let me tell you! And I figured out that all the WS rows of the chart are just plain-ol' purl-back rows. I was WAY less worried about this cable when I realized that. Hello.

I set a goal of knitting up one RS chart row and its purl-back WS row every day. Since each row is 300-400-some stitches, that's still quite a lot of knitting.

I'm currently ahead of my goal, because I did four or five rows while watching the Golden Globes on Sunday night. But I had to stop for the night when the muscles in my hands really started to ache -- too much holding-tight-while-cabling! First time that's ever happened, but it's really not surprising. I put the heating pad on my lap and my hands on the pad, and then the cat sat on my hands for a while. Fun! Then I went to bed, and when I woke up my hands felt fine. No worries.

So now I'm about halfway through the cable, and have realized that there's nothing in this chart that is scary at all. I'm so not intimidated by this cable anymore, and that was the point of tackling this project! Well, that and getting a new sweater.


Oh! I also kitchenered the underarm seams already, so I don't have to deal with that later. Also so I could avoid the cable chart for one more night, which I was fully capable of admitting to myself and to Husband. Doing the underarm seams early has the added benefit of making it easier to try on the sweater in progress. Yes, this photo is terribly unflattering. I'm okay with that. Like my cloud pjs?