Sweater Progress and Making Do

 Tegna sweater lace hem in progress.

Hello there!  How are you all doing?  I'm pretty happy and content these days.  I have even been adding long daily walks with my Black Labrador Easy to my mental health regime.  She's such a sweetie as labs generally are, but even more laid back and easy going hence her name.  It's funny that when you are well mentally doing the things that add to your mental well being are no problem, but when you are depressed can be a Herculean feat.  A few months back taking a walk around my block would have been more than I could handle, but now I'm up to walking 10,000 plus steps a day!  My hope is that by establishing a walk as part of my daily duties during these warm summer months I'll be able to keep it up during autumn and winter.

On the knitting front, I have been making slow and steady progress on my Tegna sweater.  I fussed with the gauge, as I seem to be doing lately, trying to get the yarn I already have on hand to work.  I knit up and washed a large swatch of the Charlemont fingering weight yarn on US size 5 / 3.75 mm needles and got too many stitches.  Realizing I would have to go up to at least to a US size 7 / 4.5 mm needles to get gauge, made me also realize that the fabric would be quite loose and too sheer to wear the sweater by itself.  So, since the Tegna pattern had a good selection of sizes I was able to do some math to pick which size would get me the closest to my desired amount of ease.  I'm hoping to get about 8 inches / 20 cm of ease at the bust which makes the ease at the hem a wild 27 inches / 68.5 cm by knitting the 2XL size.  If I would have gotten gauge I would knit the L size. 

Let me tell ya there are quite a few cast on stitches for the 2XL!  I followed the advice of another knitter and placed my stitch markers for the lace repeat as I was casting on to make the counting simpler.  It was such a good idea!  Good luck was with me and I didn't twist the cast on when I joined in the round.  Woohoo!  The lace chart is very clear, but with so many repeats I made any number of mistakes as my attention waned.  Some mistakes I fixed and some I just left alone as the sweater will fall into folds with so much ease that no one should be able to see them.  There are still 6 rows of lace left, then it's onto the stockinette stripes that I can knit easily while I watch a movie.  Since I talk to myself when knitting lace to keep on pattern, I haven't been able to watch or listen to any podcasts for quite a while now. 

Not being able to watch or listen to anything has made my time knitting more focused and actually more relaxed.  Thus, I am enjoying my knitting even more  This need or desire we have to multitask I think robs of of this enjoyment of being in the moment with our knitting.  Hmm, maybe I'll rethink how I want to knit the stockinette section?

As I mentioned earlier about making the yarn I have on hand work I have also been trying really hard to make due with what I have around me for other things such as my wardrobe, sewing, making dinner etc.  This brings me to having some success of turning a "wanting new" into  a "I can do that myself."  For a while now I have wanted a Fringe Field Project Bag.  I see them all over, but quite frankly they are too expensive for me.  It dawned on me while I was looking online at said bag that I could sew one myself.  It wouldn't have the leather handle, but I had thick red canvas (cira 2008) thread and got some cotton clothesline from the hardware store for cheap.  So, I embarked on an afternoon of making a project bag for myself with no pattern just a general idea from the pictures I've seen.  Below is the result.

Homemade Field project bag.

My only disappointment, if you can call it that, was that the bag doesn't close completely as the fabric is really thick.  Otherwise, I am thrilled with it!  It has 3 inside pockets, double thick sides and bottom and it stays open on it's own.  It is also big enough to hold all 4 skeins for my Tegna sweater!  A wonderful achievement for an afternoons work.  How are you finding ways to "make do" with your crafting?

Yarn Along - Around and around and around

Around and around and around and yet not getting anywhere.  Well, at least, that's how I feel about knitting my Branches and Buds sweater at the moment.  So much stockinette knit at a fine gauge on US 4 /  3.5 mm needles is slow going.  I positively flew through the yoke with it's stranded knitting of the branch pattern as it was so fun to see the pattern emerge, but now I'm left with stockinette and a little 2 x 2 ribbing.  Sigh.  I knit up one of the sleeves to break up the monotony of  knitting the body, but it too was stockinette so it wasn't much in the way of variety.  I am dying to block it and sew on the buds in the beautiful golden yarn I have chosen.  Pretty sure the sweater is going to be lovely and having tried it on twice I think it's going to fit well too.  The dark navy blue I believe is part of my problem.  You see the weather here in Central Minnesota has been very dark and gray and it has me craving the color I find lacking in my landscape.  This is the sweater I am wanting to cast on in hopes of getting to wear it this Spring.  It calls for Cobasi Plus yarn which I have in the most beautiful shade of indigo blue.  I'm excited about the pattern and trying out a new to me yarn, but I'm pushing it down until I finish my current sweater.  At least so far...

As for reading again I have no book of my own, but instead will share with you a book I'm reading to my ten year old called The Witch's Boy by Kelly Barnhill.  You may recognize the author from this previous post where I wrote about another of her books called The Girl Who Drank The Moon.  This story is a bit darker, but again has a boy, Ned, and a girl, Aine, as our main characters.  At first their lives are separate, but they soon become intertwined in the effort to save the world from magic.  Ned's mother is the town witch who uses the magic for good and Aine's father is the Bandit King and uses the magic to rob and steal.  What's interesting is the magic has a mind of it's own and has major consequences when used.  It starts with us just being concerned about Aine and Ned's families and then expands to us to hoping they stop a war between their two countries.  My son loved it and highly recommends it.

Joining in with Ginny for Yarn Along.