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What about Leo?
This is the first project that I’ve knit in a long time that has decided to fight back.
Having worked in a yarn shop doesn’t exempt you from doing stupid things, like changing yarns at the last minute and casting on without doing a swatch. I did do some homework before casting on because I already noticed that even on the ball band, the yarn I was planning on using had a slightly different gauge than the yarn used in the pattern. The original sweater called for 129 sts for the front and back pieces knitted flat, i.e. 258 sts for both pieces, and far too many for my yarn stats. When you’re working with 40″ worth of stitches, even a difference of half a stitch per 4 inches can make a dramatic change in the width of the finished sweater!
As I was also planning on knitting Leo in the round, I checked on Ravelry to see if anyone had done so previously and posted in their blog about it. I was very happy to find Meg’s post about her experience. Her numbers were different, but she pointed out the pitfalls for anyone knitting the pattern in the round. The way my numbers worked out, with 238 sts for both front and back (119 sts per piece, with 2 K sts on each end, not three), the center point for front and back moved from the middle knit stitch in the pattern repeat to the middle purl stitch.
Joining for knitting in the round is usually not a problem for me, but this time…arrrgh! I don’t know whether the circular needle I used was just too short or whether it was particularly twisty, but after (I kid you not) three attempts at getting those blasted 238 stitches joined without them twisting over the needle, I was just about ready to divorce Leo without a second thought. Fortunately, though, we worked it out.
As for the likelihood of actually finishing my chosen sweater during the month of November, I have my doubts. For the meantime Leo greets me in the morning with a cup of coffee and sends me wearily to sleep at night. I hope I have as much determination to finish him as it seems he does me.
NaKniSweMo Is Upon Us
I’ve been pretty much in a dead panic over the last couple of days just thinking about knitting Leo in a single color. Most of the comments I’ve read so far on Ravelry or via Ravelry have pointed out that this pattern is boring, boring, boring to knit. So in a last ditch effort to save my sanity and make NaKniSweMo happen, at 08:30 this morning I was at The Gourmet Yarn Shop digging through all the new arrivals for a yarn to gel my 8 different colors of Schaffhauser “Vesuvio” into a coherent sweater. Two 100gm skeins of Vitalgo “Oxford” in a dark gray/black heather to the rescue. Thank you, Orly!Casting on with crossed fingers. Progress will be noted in the sidebar. (And if you couldn’t tell, expect non-knitting posts to be light over the next month.)
(Progress bar images courtesy of YarnTomato’s Percent Bar Maker, for those of us who can’t use or don’t want to use Licketyknit’s Javascript version.)
Stash Diving for NaKniSweMo
One of the dangers of first looking for patterns and then looking through one’s yarn stash is that sometimes the pattern you want to knit doesn’t match the gauge of the yarns in your stash. That’s unfortunately what’s happened to me. My previous NaKniSweMo pattern choices #1, #2 and #3 all use yarn that weighs in at 18st per 4″, which is quite bulky and much too hot for my little normally sun-drenched corner of Israel.
Pattern choice #5, “The Very Thought of Him”, is a pattern I’ve been drooling over since it was first published, but just the very thought of Mistake Stitch Rib makes me break out in a slimy sweat. The first and only sweater I ever designed and knit for my hubby was done in Mistake Stitch Rib. It was a baseball jacket cardigan with a hand-sewn front zip and took me a good two months’ worth of full-time knitting to finish. And then my hubby put it on for the first time and it was perfect. Beaming pride, kudos and praise all around. The second time he wore it, it was still perfect. From about the third wearing I started to notice that my hubby’s naturally short arms were retreating up his sleeves. Eventually I discovered that because of the relaxed nature of Mistake Stitch Rib the upper back at the shoulders was growing…and growing…and growing. Unfortunately, none of my efforts to stabilize the shoulder area worked and rather than donate the darn thing to the Home for Aging Simians, the whole sweater became a frogged TOAD. It’s been 12 or more years since then, but the unkinked yarn is still in my closet, waiting for a second coming. To make a long story even longer, TVTOH will be knit one day with the yarn on the left above, just not for NaKniSweMo.
So, unless something drastic happens, like meteorites falling from the sky, Iran declaring Pax Nuclear or my completely misjudging what yarn goes with what (could happen!), the likely candidate for my NaKniSweMo sweater is Pattern Choice No. 4, Kristi Porter’s “Leo“, from Knitty Fall ‘04 knit with the blue Wendy Merino DK up there on the right. The general consensus on Ravelry is that this is a very boring pattern to knit. After a day of herding cats, I crave boring. 
Further to my previous PSA
of (gulp!) April 11th:
The Wool Peddler’s Shawl was wet-blocked at last on this finally cool and breezy morning. The other shawl drying in the background is my original, single hank, garter-stitch shoulder shawlette that I knit about five years ago. I fell in love with this particular colorway of Jaggerspun Heather 3/8 yarn and just had to order more for another shawl. The subtle colors at play in this yarn are sadly lacking in the photo, but it’s full of blues, greens and purples. Lucky me, there’s enough left over from the Wool Peddler’s Shawl for another shawlette, but that will have to wait.
I’ve been pouring over my back copies of Interweave Knits, the patterns on my hard drive and the Internet to try and narrow down the possible sweater patterns for November’s NaKniSweMo. My only absolute rules for NaKniSweMo are that the sweater must be made with Stash (with a capital “S”) yarn and that the majority of knitting has to be done during November. Unfortunately for me browsing through magazines like this tends to be counter productive because I keep getting sidetracked by all the lovely patterns that I know full-well haven’t got a chance in hell of my knitting them.
Top picks at this point include (listed in terms of “absolute rules” as defined above):
- Jenna Wilson’s “Banff“, from Knitty Winter ’03
- Ann Budd’s “Pullover Flair”, from IK Spring’06
- Mags Kandis’ “Serape Jacket”, from IK Summer ’04
- Kristi Porter’s “Leo“, from Knitty Fall ’04
- Kathy Zimmermann’s “The Very Thought of Him“, from IK Spring ’00, and which is now available as a single PDF download on the IK site (ignore the Fall ’04 date, it’s incorrect)
- Annie Modesitt’s “Sideways Spencer“, from IK Fall ’04, which I have been itching to knit since seeing it, but of all the sweaters I’ve listed here, this is the most unlikely for NaKniSweMo.
Are you starting to see a trend here? 
This is where the beauty of Ravelry comes in. I can check out each of these patterns to see if anyone has knit them, what yarns they used, approximately how long it took them to knit, and if they had any blog entries linked, I can read those too. Jess and Casey deserve a special reward for coming up with the idea. Knitters have been networking like crazy since the early, early days of the Net, via Usenet, mailing lists, forums, blogs and now the very latest version of our own social network.
Another NaKniSweMo update in a couple of weeks, after I make a decision, check for pattern Errata, dig out the yarn and start swatching.
