I’m making serious progress on Matt’s sweater. If I buckle down and keep going at the rate I’ve been this week, I have a fighting chance of getting it done by Christmas. Here’s the body up to the underarms, one sleeve done, and the other sleeve coming right along. I only cast on the second sleeve this past weekend. You can see that I increased the first sleeve too fast — increases at each end of every other round instead of maybe every sixth round. I’ll have to make the same mistake on the second sleeve, because I think baggy symmetric sleeves are better than one shaped different from the other. That’s Peer Gynt wool from Norway that Puttin On the Knitz sold me.
I was telling Heather at Village Knittiot in North Windham about a mitten kit I got at the Maine Fiber Frolic. Some kits barely make sense as kits — if you only sell instructions and enough whole hanks of yarn to make the project, why wouldn’t I buy instructions and yarn separately? This one has the right quantities of four colors of yarn (not more than a quarter of a hank of three of the colors — you definitely are better off with the kit, unless you’re making several pair) plus enough combed merino top for the project. It’s a lot like thrummed mittens, except instead of knitting in tufts of roving you knit fair isle with a continuous length of merino top behind three stitches of worsted weight yarn. I haven’t got to that yet. We’ll have to see how good I am about concentrating on the sweater. But here’s how far I’ve got on those, the “Oh, Wow!” mittens from, I think it is Miller Farm. One cuff.
The kit came with those three small balls of yarn, two of the dark blue, (I think those are all Bartlett 2-ply fisherman yarn) and several of the roving. Look at how different the colors of the white yarn and the roving are. Oh, those are Brittany needles, not my own, because I wanted size 10s and I only make 10 1/2s and 7s.
I had always thought that “kit” meant “something you buy to make a hobby project” (and the majority of them were model airplanes, when I was a kid) until I worked for an electronics company where the stockroom people used to say things like “I’m kitting up (or “I’m putting together kits for”) some clock formatter boards.” They meant just what you’d think, going over the bill of materials and filling a tray with the right set of parts, the circuit board, connectors, resistors, capacitors, integrated circuits, whatever it was, to make that particular item.