A Return

My knitting group usually meets twice a month, on the first and third Wednesdays. Occasionally, if there are five Wednesdays in a month, we'll meet a third time. In spite of this frequency, I had not managed to make it to one meeting since sometime in August -- either the Mister was traveling or had a work event or I had some event to go to. So last night, when I finally had a Wednesday night free, I gladly made the drive, even though I'd had a very long day and probably could have curled up in my bed and passed out early. I'm very glad I went, though, because it was a good opportunity to catch up with some friends I don't usually see otherwise -- and to get in some uninterrupted knitting time.

I left Rainbow's doll at home, because taking it would have also meant taking the giant bag of polyfill I'm using to stuff it, so instead I worked on my sweater and made a lot of progress on the first sleeve.

I think I mentioned the last couple of times I've talked about the sweater that I had more stitches for the sleeve than called for in the pattern (I had to pick up more around the armscye than specified), so I'd been pondering how to deal with those extra stitches. I finally settled on decreasing them all away, so in order to do that and not have a sleeve that was too long, I moved the increases closer together, from every 10th row to every sixth row. I finished all the decreases while I was out last night and tried on the sleeve; the length I had at that point was about at my elbow. I've decided to make these sleeves full length, so I'm adding in some straight rounds before I start the patterned cuff.

There's still a good chunk of knitting to be done on this sweater before it's done, but it's moving a lot more quickly now. It also looks like I may have an entire skein of yarn leftover when I'm done, in spite of the added length to the sleeves, as I only just joined the fourth skein last night (the fifth was used to knit the swatch, which is still attached to it). I can guarantee that this sweater will be worn right away as soon as it's off the needles -- they're calling for snow on Saturday!