Celtic cable sweater

Recipient: John Hudson MacDonald
Designer: Meself
Pattern: As yet untitled
Completed: June 16, 2005
Colours: Red
Yarn: Innovation 80% acrylic 20% nylon, sportweight
Size: About 12 months
Completed status: Given June 16, 2005, baby born June 29, 2005
Thank-you note: Thanks so much for the sweater and the Itchy + Scratchy mittens! They look so great now, we can't wait to see them on the baby! Thanks again
Pictures: None

2005-Jun-16

I stayed up quite late last night to finish it, but IT GOT DONE. It looks freakin' awesome, if I do say so myself. I'm really super-pleased. I still have great bitterness towards the sweater for putting me through everything it did, but I cannot deny that it is a beautiful piece of work and that I am proud as punch about it. Then this morning, DH and I slept in, were late leaving the house, hit really bad traffic, and I barely got to work in time for the party to actually give the sweater to my co-worker. However, I made it with about three minutes to spare. He loved it. Very appreciative. It also provoked a spontaneous 'awwww' from the rest of the department. :) I am flushed with triumph...and pretty tired, too.

2005-Jun-15

No further serious mistakes have been made since my last blog entry (although I realise I have invited Murphy to throw one at me just by typing that). However, time grows exceedingly short, and I have no idea how I'm going to finish this before tomorrow morning (and get something which remotely resembles a good night's sleep). The second sleeve is still not finished (although there are only six more rows to go) and there is a huge cowl neck still to do, to say nothing of the various ends which have to be woven in, nor of the bobbles which somehow have to be faked in the spots where I forgot to knit them in. (We will not discuss the spots where I put bobbles where I was not supposed to. I don't see how I can possibly fix those after the fact. Everyone who sees this sweater is just going to have to suck it up and ignore the extraneous bobbles.) And I'm sooo tired already because I stayed up late last night trying to get ahead on the project. Woe is me. Snivel, snivel, whine. (And yaaaawn.)

2005-Jun-14

61 hours left: Finish picking up stitches for sleeve #2. Start knitting.
47.5 hours left: Discover that I should have done my first sleeve decrease in the previous row. Screw it. I'll decrease in the next row instead. No one will notice.
47 hours left: Discover that I started the sleeve at the wrong point in the main cable pattern. I cannot possibly fudge this one because the main sleeve pattern transitions into the rib pattern, which means that the ribbing must start at a specific point in the main sleeve pattern. In order for the two sleeves to be the same length, the main pattern must therefore begin at the same point on both sleeves. I am forced to rip out two precious inches of sleeve. To top it off, putting the work back on the needles post-ripping takes a long time because of dropped stitches. Vicious cursing occurs throughout.
43.5 hours left: Discover a dropped stitch three rows previously that messes up one of the cable patterns - unless, of course, I want to rip that section of the sleeve back three rows and redo the cables manually. The cable pattern in question is small, right at the bottom of the sleeve at the armpit and is getting decreased out of existence further along the sleeve anyway. Screw it. I work the dropped stitch up for the three dropped rows but don't recreate the cable pattern. Very little guilt is felt.
40.5 hours left: Blog about the Project From Hell. Feel even more panicked. Doom approaches.

2005-Jun-13

Last week's goal was achieved late last night: I finished sleeve #1. Now I have to do sleeve #2, design and make the cowl neck, and weave in ends. Before Thursday morning. LOTS to do in a short amount of time. So what happens? I put the project in my bag this morning...and forgot to pack the needles. A fact I only discovered as we were about to get on the highway this morning, when I took the project out to work on it. DH, bless him, was all for turning around and going back for the needles, but since we were already late and still had to make a detour to get desperately-needed gas for the car, I said no. (And a good thing too, because the fill-up alone made me 20 minutes late for work.) Fortunately, I do have some stitch holders in my accessories kit, which I'm using to pick up stitches around the armscye for sleeve #2. So some progress is being made today, despite my idiocy.

2005-Jun-10

Front and back are done. This means I have now done everything that was supposed to be completed by the end of last week. But wait - it gets better! Shoulder straps are also done, and I'm well into the first sleeve - I only have about 45 rows to go. Hopefully I can do that by the end of the weekend so that I'm still on schedule. Then, with any luck, I can finish sleeve #2, design and knit the cowl neck, and weave in all the loose ends by Thursday morning when we have our mini-party for my co-worker. Or not. Now that I've written all that out it seems like a heckuva lot to do. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

2005-Jun-6

I have a bad feeling that I am going to be late finishing this sweater. Here's the thing...I asked co-worker's boss if our department would be throwing any kind of party to celebrate the upcoming blessed event. She said she's planning to 'pass the hat' around and give him a gift certificate at our department picnic on the 16th. This means that, if I want to piggy-back on that little celebration, I have to have this sweater done in ten days. TEN DAYS?!? But no...it gets better. Co-worker's wife works for the same employer, although in a different department. So it's possible that any moment now, our department will get invited to a joint party for both of them, which of course would be the ideal time to give my gifts. The problem is that this (as yet theoretical) party might be even earlier than the 16th, since co-worker's wife is planning to go on mat leave at the end of June, and co-worker has been heard to express doubts that she will even last that long. To make matters even worse, the knitting project schedule I wrote up for myself last week had me finishing the body by this point, and I'm not even close. I've finished knitting the body in the round and have divided for the sleeves, but I'm only working on the first side of the front neckline - the back of the sweater above the armscyes is still completely untouched. Clearly, I have messed up badly on the planning and timing of this project. I may have to forge full steam ahead on this, and ignore DH's stripy socks for a little while.

2005-Jun-2

Work continues, very slowly. I'm about two inches away from the bottom of the armscyes. This sounds great, except that I realised I don't remember what kind of neck shaping I wanted to do for the sweater. Sorta important information to know, eh? Especially since I think I wanted to do a cowl-neck, which means starting the neck shaping very low down. I'd better figure this out pronto.

2005-Jun-1

I have almost reached the same point I was at pre-frogging. I'm hoping to get a fair bit done tonight, even though I will probably have to start and stop a lot as I help DH with his golf club covers.

2005-May-31

I noticed this morning in the car that one of the cable patterns looked a little weird - 'skewiff', as the saying goes in my family. And I'm not just talking about one of the cable sections. I mean that every single instance (and there are eight of them) of this cable pattern was doing the same weird thing at the same point. I investigated more closely, and sure enough, I'd messed up about eight rows back. On all eight occurrences of the cable. (Now that takes talent, I tell ya.) So I started ripping back just those sections and fixing them. It didn't take long before I realised that this approach was a colossal waste of time and energy. Manually fixing six stitches over about eight rows, eight times, over a pattern which includes cable crosses and bobbles? Not my cup of tea. So I ripped the whole sweater back to the point of error (*sob* - there goes over an inch of work) and am redoing it. The worst part? This sweater has slipped into the Black Hole of knitting. You know, that phenomenon where you knit and knit and knit and knit and knit, and then remeasure, and you've gained like a centimetre of length? Yeah. That.

2005-May-30

This is coming along - I only have a few more inches to go before I divide for armholes and start knitting the front and back separately.

2005-May-27

This was my 'cover' project last night, so whenever DH came upstairs I hid the socks project and picked this one up instead. Not much got done, but I feel very virtuous for having gotten back into this. I suspect I will have to concentrate my efforts on this sweater in the next few weeks, since there will probably be a shower at work in advance of when the baby is actually due, and I'll want the sweater done in time for that.

2005-May-26

Took this out of hiding yesterday and measured the circumference so I could get an idea of what size I'm making this thing to be. :) It's 24-25 inches around at the body, so I figure this is a twelve month size. That means I'll want about eight inches of body from the bottom of the sweater to the beginning of the armscyes. Armed with this information, I can now continue to work the body without fear that I will knit past the point where I'm supposed to start the armscye. If the sweater is lucky, I might even work on it tonight.

2005-Apr-11

Bottom ribbing is complete, main body has begun. It's looking great so far.

2005-Apr-8

I started this up again last night, and I took it to work with me this morning. I'm not finished the bottom ribbing yet, but it's definitely getting there, and I haven't been making any more errors worth mentioning. I also stopped off this morning at the Lewiscraft local to my office and picked up two more balls of the yarn, since I'm running extremely low. I was actually pretty shocked that the yarn was in stock - Murphy's Law usually dictates that if you start a project when you know you don't have enough yarn, without actually going out and buying the extra yarn first, especially when the project gives you as hard a time as this one has been giving me, that more yarn for the project will be totally unattainable. And yet, this was not the case. This makes me very nervous, because surely this means that Murphy will exact revenge on me in some other horrible way?

2005-Mar-21

The hell continued. I ripped it back again, and cast on precisely 170 stitches. Then I joined it in the round, making ABSOTIVELY POSILUTELY TRIPLE SURE that I hadn't twisted it. As I worked through row 1, I kept checking and double-checking that there was no twist, and it kept coming up good every time. Excellent! Until...at the end of row 1 I realised I'd made a pattern mistake somewhere along the row. I looked back, and sure enough, it was near the beginning. "Screw it," thought I, "I'll just keep going on row 2, and fix the incorrect stitches of row 1 before knitting the row 2 stitches as I come to them." Yeah. About ten fixed-stitches into this dumbass idea, I said "Screw it" again and tinked the first row back to my original error. Sigh. This project is doomed, I tell you, doomed. The nice news is that after that, the project started to take off. I'm now on about row 6 of the ribbing. No more mistakes so far. Pray for me.

2005-Mar-18

Let's review, shall we? So far on this project, I have:

Done a few test swatches. These took some time.

Cast on for the project in green and worked on that for a while.

Decided I wanted to go with red and change the pattern a bit, so ripped out the green and cast on again in red and started the bottom ribbing.

Decided I wanted to change the ribbing a bit, so ripped out the red and started the bottom ribbing the new way.

Discovered at the end of row 1 that I'd cast on one too many stitches...no problem. Combined the last two stitches in a P2tog, problem solved.

Discovered I had, FOR THE SECOND TIME IN A WEEK, twisted the knitting when I joined in the round. Rip.

Discovered at the end of row 1 that I'd cast on about ten too many stitches. No P2tog fix for that one, baby. Rip.

VERY CAREFUL CASTING ON OF EXACTLY 170 STITCHES. Double-checked the number of stitches.

VERY CAREFUL JOINING OF THE ROUND TO AVOID TWISTING. Lots of double-checking.
And guess what. This morning on the subway, it became clear that I had twisted the knitting again. Words cannot describe my feelings at this moment. This sweater is taking on almost MSF mittens proportions. I swear, I'm not doing this deliberately. In fact, it's pretty damn depressing. I have been thinking of myself as a good knitter, not to mention an intelligent person. Clearly, I am neither. I am very close to saying 'f**k it' and doing surgery. This is insanity.

2005-Mar-16

I ripped it out again last night. (This poor yarn, I tell ya.) I had another idea for how I wanted to do the bottom ribbing, so of course I had not choice but to frog. Got it back on the needles pretty quickly, though. Re-ribbing proceeds.

2005-Mar-7

Much "test" knitting was done over the weekend. I think I now have the pattern down the way I want it. But rather than confirming this with another piece of test knitting, I have foolishly forged ahead on the actual sweater. Twice. I changed my mind about the colour - it's now red. I was originally doing it in mint green, but then I realised that the mittens for the same baby were also mint green, so I switched. The baby will be half-Chinese, so it's a good bet that it will have the colouring to wear red. Plus I have the impression that red is a big good-luck colour in Chinese culture, so I think it will be appreciated all round. The only potential snag is that I'm using the red leftover from the United Way argyle cardigan I recently finished. I can tell you right now that there is no way I have enough left to do the entire sweater - I know I will have to go out and get more. This makes me very nervous, since when I bought the yarn originally, it was the last ball in the whole store. The likelihood of not being able to find any more of this yarn is high. I admit that I'm being very brazen in my tempting of Murphy. We shall see. At any rate, I'm now on the bottom ribbing, working in the round.

2005-Jan-30

So I went back to my notes for my book to see what designs are still left to create that I would want to make for this baby. One of them was a cowl-necked cabled sweater. This sounded fun, plus the fact that my co-worker seems to be keen on getting a sweater for his baby, so...I started designing some cables. I'm currently swatching a combination of the cables I worked out to figure out sizing. They look pretty darn good so far.

2005-Jan-13

I remembered that I was looking for an excuse to design another pattern for the book I want to write. Because if I try to just write patterns independently on my own "free time", the book will stay unwritten. But it really would be cool to do something Simpsons-y for my coworker. Argh, this indecision. I will think on it. I have months.

2005-Jan-11

I still don't know what I'm going to make, but I am contemplating something with the Simpsons on it. I believe this would be received extremely well.

2005-Jan-10

My department at work is just a baby machine, I tell ya. Another of my co-workers announced on Friday that he is expecting his first baby in July. So! I shall have to figure out what to make.