Back to the Beginning

Now that my Chandail is done, I find myself again in that weird spot where there's no big project to work on. I'm still working on my cowl during my lunch breaks (and I'm in the home stretch as far as that's concerned -- roughly halfway through the last ruche -- so I should have it finished by this weekend) and I don't really feel like picking up my Breezy Cardigan again, so I decided it was time to go back to square one for any project: swatching.

For starters, I had to swatch with some gorgeous Malabrigo Rios that I picked up at my LYS last weekend for another design project. The colorway is Sunset, which is a color I'm still not entirely sure I can pull off but that's been calling to me for several months now, so I finally gave in. I swatched with US 6's, which usually gives me about 5 stitches to the inch, but I wanted to be sure. I've never worked with this yarn before, and it is superwash, so I'll wait to see what it does after a dip in the water.

Then there's the other swatch. The test for my sweater pattern is in full swing, but no one's signed up for the 32" size, so I thought I'd knit it myself (and, conveniently, it should fit my mother, so I'll have a gift for her when I'm done). For the yarn, I went into deep stash and pulled out some bright pink Cascade 220 that I bought from WEBS more than five years ago (I could dig through my archives to figure out when, but that would take a while -- I do know that I bought it back when we were living in the old townhouse, and we moved out of there almost five years ago).

Knitting this up will have the double benefit of giving me an opportunity to double check my yardage estimate for the pattern and clearing another sweater's lot of yarn out of the stash. This should go a little faster than knitting the sweater in my size, as my mother's significantly smaller than I am and I've got the pattern all finalized this time around. It might also help to quash my desire to knit myself another sweater right away!