MMmmmm... Pi day!
I never thought I could be so excited about sleeves! But tonight I finished the right front of the sweater, and moved onto the sleeves. I think this project has been the first to sustain my excitement and energy for such a long time-- anything else that I have been working on for this long has been regarded with at least a smidgen of dread by this point in the project ("oh, this again" or "still this same old thing??" syndrome). But here I cast on the left sleeve, and I am so excited! It also may be because the sweater is starting to have a shape. And I am still really liking the yarn I chose, the color will go with so many things, and while I find the dropped stitch pattern really simple now that I have practiced it so much, it looks rather impressive.
In other knitting news, yesterday Molly (my best-knitting-friend) and I ran around town looking for the materials to make blocking boards. So we found the blocking pins and the 1 inch checked gingham fabric to cover the boards as a guide for laying out whatever is being blocked. As for the boards themselves, I wanted to get the right kind of material-- something sturdy and solid that blocking pins will easily stick in. I read on knitty.com about how one might choose homasote boards. So we stopped at the home depot, but no luck. Then ace hardware, and still no luck. In fact, everyone we asked hadn't even heard of homasote. We were thinking, are we crazy? Did we maybe accidentally make this up? I know I feel that way about school stuff from time to time, but not usually about knitting! Then finally, a nice guy at ace was like "yeah, homasote! You have to go to the lumberyard to get that!"
So... on the one hand, we weren't crazy! Homasote did exist! On the other, I was thinking, "lumberyard?" I mean, I didn't have much time left for running around town, but the lumberyard is actually less than a mile from where I live, and from the ace hardware where we were at the time. Have I mentioned how much I love where I live?? So we moseyed over to the lumberyard, and about 10 minutes later we had driven through the warehouse (talk about service! I didn't know that drive-through warehouses existed!), watched our large piece of homasote be cut like butter through the saw and stuck it in the backseat of the car! Homasote is very cool-- it is quite substantial (hefty, and good thickness), and it's made from compressed recycled paper. I love recycling! So this seems like it was worth running around town for. So that's as far as it has gotten--the homasote is now occupying a nice space in the living room, waiting to be covered... perhaps this weekend, I am getting antsy to see what this blocking magic is all about! I seriously sat through my seminar this afternoon, fantasizing about wetting down and laying out the sweater pieces (yes, class was that boring today... it can't always be inspiring).
I also am already thinking about my next sweater. This is a very good sign!!
So I was going to post some pictures I just took, but they will have to wait until tomorrow, as my camera is being troublesome. If I am being honest about it, it's me and not the camera. You might think that because I've had the camera for like 2 years I would have figured out how to easily download my pictures. But instead I just got a really big memory card, and kind of ignored how full it has been. Silly, I should just figure it out-- it just looks like it is going to take a bit of a while to download my pictures tonight, and it's way past my bedtime (Jon Stewart is almost over! And I have stats at 9 am... yuck).
So, I promise better pictures tomorrow than I could have provided tonight, anyways.