On a Mission

Now that Spinzilla is over, I have one primary mission for the next week and a half or so: finish my Rhinebeck sweater. I think it may be a nail-biter, but I'm going to do my best to make it happen. Last night I picked up the stitches for the first sleeve and worked a good bit of the short-row sleeve cap shaping. I'm hoping to get through the rest of that tonight so I can start working the whole sleeve in the round -- I have a feeling that part is going to fly.

Short-row shaping means that there's really no good place to stop, hence the disheveled look of this sleeve. Once it gets going, it's fairly fast, but of course getting to this point is always a challenge. Any time I have to pick up a very specific number of stitches I invariably end up ripping and redoing at least once (I think it took me three or four tries with this sleeve). I actually have an extra stitch somewhere in there that I'll need to hide because I had a slight gap when I finished picking up the last section and had to pick up one more stitch to fix it.

The sweater is a bit too big to bring to work for my lunch break knitting, so I've been working on my new sock design again -- and I finished the first one today! I'm very pleased with how this knit up.

I've already got a draft of the pattern mostly written, which means that I can likely take a couple of photos of the completed sock and get the pattern off to my tech editor this weekend (given that sock yarn usage is so variable, I don't need to finish the pair to determine yarn requirements). I'll still knit the second sock, of course, but I have some yarn support on its way to me for a new pattern that I'm hoping to debut early next month, so it may have to wait.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a sleeve to knit!