what's next, you ask?

Believe it or not the Christmas crafting season is wrapping up around here at chez busybee. I try to start early, and end a bit early, admitting that there are some people you just can't craft for as they really would like gift certificates and not homemade car air-fresheners (by the way that was a total bust of a project - it now lives in the trash...) or any other nonsense I might whip up. Plus I want to enjoy the season as well, not just hide out in the back room and make stuff for it.

So what's next? I joined the Colorwork challenge knitalong. You can check out the details and join yourself here. My plan is to use this a motivation and encouragement not only to finish that gosh darned floral sweater from Poetry in Stitches (just half a sleeve left!) and to finally knit a sweater I designed for Elliott last Christmas (merry Christmas!). Since he's made some noise about where that sweater is and why don't I make it, I think he actually likes the design and would wear it. This is an important consideration to factor in when making a sweater for a larger than you husband another person. So it's time to get cranking. Here's where it stands. I decided I wanted a fair isle construction / Norwegian-ish looking sweater. I looked through a lot of middle eastern patterns, since Elliott is a big fan of design from that region, for inspiration and settled on a few that looked good together as a main overall design and a border. Here's a photo of a sketch of the sweater and a charted sheet of the patterns.



Then I test knit a few swatches of the patterns with some 2 ply shetland fingering yarn I had on hand.



The next steps include figuring out the hems and finalizing some of the construction details, picking colors and yarns, test swatching with the chosen yarns, figuring out the actual pattern based on the gauge from the test swatch and casting on! no sweat, right?