Enough Knitting to Cause a Callous

Man oh man, did I have a weekend of knitting. We left for Hidden Valley late Saturday morning. I cast on for my second Jawoll sock in the car and got a good inch of cuff done by the time we got to our friend's house. Then The Mister and the rest of the group went to hit the slopes, and I settled in with a new episode of Cast On, some figure skating, and the yarn for my aunt's sweater. Six hours of knitting later, I found myself with a lovely callous on my right middle finger and about six inches of body:

I had my uncle do some measurements for this sweater on the sly; I gave him very specific instructions to measure a sweater that fits my aunt well when she wasn't home. Based upon the numbers he sent me, it looks like we wear pretty much the same size, so I'll be able to try this sweater on and know if it's knitting up to be the right size.

I'm knitting at a gauge of 5 stitches to the inch and aiming for a 36" chest. I decided to do ribbing instead of hems this time around and to make the body a bit longer. I cast on 192 stitches to start out with (I wanted the bottom to measure 38 inches, but I had to add on two additional stitches to make the 2x2 rib work). After two inches of ribbing, I worked paired decreased at each side for some waist shaping and to get down to 180 stitches. Now I'm at the part where I just knit knit knit until the body is long enough. Boring, yes, but also good movie/TV knitting.

We left pretty early yesterday morning to come home, ran our errands, and relaxed the rest of the day. I decided it was high time I finish my Bird in Hand mittens, so that became my project for yesterday. I'm now decreasing for the hand of the left mitten and should work on the thumb tonight.

On this mitten, I kept my floats a lot shorter than on the first -- no more than four stitches. Part of my reasoning is that I wanted less to catch my ring on when I wear the mittens, but it will be interesting to see if there's any difference in the colorwork in the two mittens as a result.

I really like these mittens and the pattern, but I am so ready to be done knitting worsted weight yarn on size 2 needles. No wonder I have callouses!