The Very Best Part

I've knit sweaters every which way possible--in pieces, top-down and bottom-up, even sideways.  More often than not, however, I find myself knitting seamless top-down yoke or raglan sweaters.  My two current sweater projects, Leyfi and Goodale, are no exception.  I've been switching off between these two and have lately been slugging through the raglan/yoke increases on both sweaters.  For me, this is the most hated part of the top-down sweater: where the rounds or rows keep getting longer and longer until it feels like it takes 30 minutes to knit two long boring rows. The great part about this tedious stretch is that it is followed by my absolute favorite part:  separating off the sleeves and knitting the body. Without those sleeve stitches everything suddenly seems far more manageable.  I feel like I'm making actual progress. And I get to try on the sweater. So exciting!

Since Leyfi is knit with bulky yarn, there were far fewer stitches to begin with, and so it's not surprising that I kept picking up this sweater first.  I divided off the sleeves this weekend. Woohoo!

I then forced myself to go back to Goodale.  It was slow, boring, and at some point I realized I had accidentally changed the way I was doing the increase stitches halfway through the raglan increases (oops!).  It's not hugely noticeable, and there was no thought of ripping back those 300 stitch rows.  Yesterday, I finally reached the end  of the increases, divided off the sleeves and tried it on.

It fits!  Oh, happy happy day!  I'm knitting this sweater in Sanguine Gryphon Skinny Bugga! in Southern Green Stink Bug.  It took me forever to settle on a color, and although it does look very pretty in the skein and knitted up, when I tried it on, it looked so amazingly beautiful that I literally gasped out loud.  (I think my next post might just have to be about my love affair with Sanguine Gryphon yarn). This gorgeousness is obviously not apparent at all in pictures.  Maybe one day, I'll get the lighting and focus just right and everyone else can see what I see.  Given how taken I am with this sweater now, combined with how amazingly hot I was for the five minutes I had on Leyfi, I'm now going full steam ahead on Goodale and looking forward to the next very best part of sweater knitting--binding off and finishing! Yup, I'm one of those rare knitters who actually loves finishing tasks. 

Completely unrelated:  I'm a full-time editor, and I work from home a couple of days a week.  Rugby and Juno are almost always in the office with me during the day, and pretty much the second Rugby sees me sit at the computer, he hops up onto the futon (I let him start doing this right about the time we inflicted a puppy on him).  During the middle of the day when I'm weary from staring at the computer screen, I often look over jealously at my snoozing pups.  Yesterday as I was working I glanced over to see this:

Sometimes I really wish I was a dog.