End of summer pullover

I think what I love most about knitting, when I don't have a ton of redo's to do, is the crazy transformation of a ball of fiber into something I can wear out into the world. I know it seems from my scribbles here that I watch a lot of TV/movies, but in reality, 95% of the time that there's something playing, I'm doing something else. The only times I'm ever really solely watching a screen is if it's a specific movie with R. Otherwise, it's usually a program or documentary on in the background, while I do something with my hands. For a long time they were hovering over a keyboard of some sort, but for the last few years they've been immersed in a fluff of woolen bits. Stitch by stitch, from a lap full of yarn, alongside a mug of Sunday morning coffee or weeknight glass of fizzy water (or...wine), to a drawer full of sweaters and tanks.

While I used to stay up late to finish a good book, now almost every time I pull an all-nighter, it's because I made a mistake in whatever I'm knitting and want to redo it, or I'm just on a roll and have to keep on rolling, or I have a ball of yarn to wind—which takes concentration so I don't create a tear-inducing snarled mess. Granted, now that I share my bed, I can't really stay up late snuggled between the sheets immersed in a good book (and late-night page turning on the couch just isn't as good), but I'm pretty sure that it'd be the case, regardless.

Unlike sewing, knitting requires quite a bit of forethought—which of course isn't something I always excel at doing because I'm so impatient to get cracking. You can't just rip a seam and redo. Knitting requires that you plan ahead, unless you want to unravel all your work and start over. It's not nearly as forgiving as other crafts, and maybe that's why I like it: you have to work (really) hard for it, especially when it comes to something to wear vs. something to use, and it forces you to either love it or hate it. I don't think there's really an in-between—I suppose you could say there are some parallels with that sentiment and with how people feel about me, but we can talk about that later.

Knitting is addictive, too. As soon as I bound off that baby set, I cast on for this (literally, the same evening). And, when I bound off these stitches, I cast on later that day for another project.

It can be a little daunting to have multiple pieces of a knit creation floating around, because any time you hold stitches aside and pick them up later to knit (as you would for a sweater when you start at the shoulder and continue down the body, holding stitches aside for the sleeve), you (well, maybe not you, but certainly I), risk that you might pull at the structure and inadvertently muss up the lines.

Which is why I'm crazy for projects that are either worked in the round (as you would do a sock) and / or worked flat, and then seamed up at the edges to create something wearable. The latter is how this pullover was created.

Do you see those diagonal seam lines? The way this is constructed, you knit one long rhomboid, with a hole in the center for your neck and funny batwings hanging off either edge. Then, because this stitch creates a diagonal pull like a bias-cut dress, you have to wind the flaps around themselves to create the tubes that become the body and sleeves. So those seams you see across the arm and midsection aren't design elements, but the foundation for turning a misshapen blob of fiber (both R and I were thinking that I had just wasted a whole week when we saw what I was left with before seaming) into something that actually resembles a sweater.

I could have stood to make this a wee bit bigger at the hemline so it lay flat instead of that little foldover, but, as usual, I worried that it was going to be too floppy, so I erred on the smaller side and luckily it juuust fits. Any fewer stitches and it would probably have been too uncomfortable to wear.

And: a few more vanity shots, just because. Now, what to knit next?