Big Grey Sweater? Check.

The Big Grey Sweater is done.

I started knitting Avast, for Jer, in August 2007. He is a picky, picky man when it comes to his clothing so it took a long time for him to decide on a pattern and I stressed the entire time if the final product was going to be to his liking. And it is.



It took me too long to knit this, I admit. I took breaks between pieces to knit other things, I had to wait for back ordered needles and I ran out of yarn at one point. Amazingly, I found more of the same dye lot in a store in a very different city from where I bought the orginal. So finally, on Saturday night after reading a number of tutorials on how to sew in a zipper, I sat down with my needle and thread and 2.5 hours later (so painfully long, there is a reason I don't sew) the sweater had a zipper, and I was done. There was very little seaming, the body was knit in one piece to the armpits, then the sleeves were added and the whole thing knit, doing raglan decreases, to the neck. The only seams were sleeves and hems, there was a lot of picking up and knitting to create the hems and I am now much better at it.



I used Jo Sharp Silkroad DK Tweed in Night, which I believe is now a discontinued colour. It's a beautiful yarn, but the cabled band that runs along the bottom of this sweater doesn't show up very well and that is a little disappointing. I didn't really alter the pattern much, I'm no designer, but I did add extra length everywhere for my husband and his Monkey arms. I'm really quite happy with the fit, it's a great sweater for the long and lean.



Now, back to stalking the mailbox for my RSC package.

Attention everyone

Attention! Avast is blocking! Yes that's right, I finally finished knitting the giant grey thing. And when it is dry, I will seam the sleeves and the hems, find a zipper and figure out how to attach the darn thing. It looks quite spiffy all pinned out on the floor, if I do say so myself.

Here it is, in it's 62 inch wingspan glory.



Also this weekend, another item checked off the to be finished list, the second pair of Monkeys for SIL. Modelled by my rather slim 7 year old son whose feet are much too small for these socks.



These were made with STR mediumweight in Metamorphic with 2.25mm Knit Picks DPNS. I'll see her next weekend, hopefully she likes them as much as she does the Pink Granite pair.

And, well, because I'm weak and I was happy to have finished knitting Avast, I finished the first sock of the RSC January shipment. I added another 1/2 repeat to the leg and by weight I should have plenty of yarn left for the second sock. I don't like short socks. These are great socks. Again, modelled by big boy, 7, who keeps asking if these are for him "because I REALLLLLLLLY like this colour Mommy."



And, lots of knitting this week, Tangled came out of time out. Turns out all it needed was a few days of sitting in it's basket to find the error of it's ways, and now it's behaving nicely. It still takes about an hour to do one of the cable rows, but I'm getting there. The next row has a 5->1 DECREASE! WOOHOO! Sorry, no pictures yet.

Tomorrow, we celebrate the first ever Family Day holiday. Hopefully this freezing rain will turn to snow and maybe we will go sledding for a bit.

Another one bites the dust

My basket is getting more and more empty!

I did start the Serendipity socks, only to frog what I did because it was too big and knit it again, and I'm just about done with the first pattern repeat. But! I finished Jeremy's slippers! I made him felted clogs a year ago (have I told this story before?) and he loves them, says they have changed his life. He didn't want me to go out and buy more wool to make them as I had enough feltable bits left over from other things that I could make him a non-matching pair. So, he has one purple/white slipper and one green/white slipper. What he wanted was a second pair so he could leave the mismatched pair at his office so he can wear them at the end of the day when he's doing paperwork and returning phone calls (no patients!), and have a pair at home. And being the (somewhat) good knitting wife I am, I made his giant feet another pair.



The problem. They are really wide. Does anyone know how to fix that without making them any shorter? I'm afraid to put them in the washer again because the length is good, but they are really floppy.

Hopefully by Monday I'll have an "all but the zipper" post about Avast. The end is in sight! I need to do the bottom band and a little bit of seaming (hems and sleeves). Then the zipper, even though I'm not quite sure how the zipper is actually going to get attached to the sweater.

Those of you that are getting buried under snow and freezing rain (like we are today) be safe!