Round and round and round

Despite the fact that I have now been caught in a few situations with no knitting to do, I have succesfully avoided casting on for a new pair of socks. New socks have to wait until either the FLAK cardigan is complete, or else I get so sick of cables that I get desperate for something small and portable to do.

Speaking of the FLAK cardigan, this morning I did the second cuff, which means that the sleeves are finally done.

Ignore all those ends hanging out – I tend to leave all end-tucking-in until the very last because otherwise the knitting goblins always manage to set up pitfalls where I then have to undo carefully tucked in ends, and really, I’d rather avoid that if I can.

Technically, if I am going to be completely truthful, the sleeves are not actually 100% done. I discovered after I’d bound off both cuffs that one is slightly longer than the other. I know why – one has one more pattern repeat of the cables – so it’s going to be easy to fix, but I am going to leave them alone for now in order to focus on the finishing the body. Once there is enough body to comfortably try the entire thing on, I’ll see how the length of the sleeves looks, and may have to do a little bit of tweaking with both sleeves at that point. For now though, they’re at least out of the way, and as you can probably see, I’ve already picked up all the body stitches and have worked 8 rows already. I decided to see if picking up stitches along a hem in moss pattern would actually work, and what do you know, it does. I’m quite happy with how well it worked, actually, since picking up the stitches all in knit stitches would have left a visible line I was hoping very much to avoid. This way the line between the top moss stitches, which go from left to right, and the bottom moss stitches, which go from top to bottom, will be much harder to spot unless you’re looking at it close up.

And because the cardigan is a bit too bulky to be project for discreet knitting, I dug out the Pacific Northwest shawl this morning, figuring I could be quietly ripping out the offending rows of the lace in order to get back to a point where I don’t have anything weird going on. But as I started looking at it more carefully, I realized that I was off only one stitch, and if I was careful about how I picked up an extra stitch to take its place, the shawl was actually going to turn out just fine and likely no one would ever be the wiser once it’s blocked and on display. So instead of tediously ripping out row after row, I actually managed to add on a number of rows and am feeling much happier about the entire thing. After all, it is not so amazing what elminating the prospect of having to unknit upwards of ten rows of lace knitting (about 200 stitches per row) will do for one’s mood.