Welcome to Sleeve Island

Even with all the activity of the crazy weekend, I did manage to get some knitting done (the nice thing about being around family is that they expect you to be knitting constantly while you sit around and talk). If you saw my Instagram post yesterday, then you already know this, but the body of my Rhinebeck sweater is done!

Last night I just got started on the first sleeve; I only got about 10 rounds done because I spent a good chunk of time crunching numbers for all the sizes and making adjustments so that there can be a round of colorwork just above the sleeve ribbing. Now I am on my way, and I'm hoping that the sleeves will fly. I know some people find sleeves to be boring and kind of a slog, but I actually don't mind them and find them to be relatively fast to knit. The total number of stitches is a lot less than what I had for the body, and obviously the rounds get smaller the farther along I get. Finishing up both sleeves this week might be a bit of a stretch, but I'm fairly confident that the entire sweater will be done by the end of the month. Very soon I need to find some time to focus and start writing up the pattern from all my notes and scraps of paper. There are only 32 days until Rhinebeck and I don't want to be rushing at the last minute!

My brioche hat is moving along as well and I should be ready to start the crown decreases at lunch today. I ended up working on it at the Lion King on Sunday, which perhaps wasn't the smartest of moves (I did make a couple of mistakes -- knitting brioche in the dark isn't for the faint of heart!), but it seems to have ended up okay.

My reading over the last week has been all about The Testaments. I'm generally only able to read a handful of pages a night before bed, and I am savoring it -- it is so good. As luck would have it, I also just finished up the second season of The Handmaid's Tale TV series, and I see enough similarities between the new book and some some elements of the series that I'm fairly certain Margaret Atwood let a few details of the new book slip to the writers. I won't give anything away, but I will say that I've enjoyed both iterations of the fictional world of Gilead.