the sweater: Ribby Cardi
the yarn: Cotton Ease in Stone
the previous entries: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

I’m half way done with my second sleeve, and I got my Ravelry invite today. Ravelry, in case you don’t already know (of course you do, you’re hip and well informed like that) is a community for knitters and crocheters. A little bit like Flickr, and a little bit like a great big blog network and database of patterns, yarns and tools, it’s intricately connected to itself, Flickr and RSS feeds from blogs in a way that makes it very useful indeed. It’s proved quite the time suck in the eight hours or so that I’ve been poking around. It’s in beta so you have to have a sign in to look around, and they are uber popular right now so it’ll take about two weeks to get your invite after you request one (right hand side of the home page), but it looks like you will get one.

Through Ravelry I came across this new (new to me?) pattern by Chicknits, Twist, that might be what I use my Chocolate brown Berocco Comfort yarn to make. Pretty but still fairly simple.

Here is my current sleeve next to my finished sleeve, both of which I knit in the round:

I messed up the order of the increases on the first one, and further messed them up on the second one. Oh well, nobody will ever notice and I wasn’t so far off that it will affect the look of the sweater at all. Those orange and green bits of yarn above are me counting how many rows I have in one sleeve – 145 rows. I leave them there in case I lose the place where I noted it, or start to second guess myself and feel the need to count them all over again.

I’ve come to a point where I won’t have any easy knitting to do in the car on the way to Thanksgiving, but I also won’t have the grey sweater ready to wear. I’ll have to start something new. I’m thinking of (dork alert) making a Ribby Cardi vest for myself to wear while I sew in my cold basement room. Down vests are too puffy, fleece vests leave little fibers all over my fabrics and I have not found a quilted vest that fits correctly, so I’ll make one my damn self.

This knitting sweaters for yourself thing is so worth it.