January and the Damn Sweater

It’s been a while and I have meant to post, and have even written the posts in my head, but just haven’t sat down to write. And now January is almost over, one month of 2009 already gone and it’s been a month since Christmas. Time sure goes faster when you are older, doesn’t it?

I’m now eligible to retire. It’s nice having that bullet proof feeling. That I can walk out the door when I want. I wish the economy was better, and that I could find a part-time job during school hours. So for now, I wait and figure out what is best for me, yet I know I am tired of having 12-hour days when you add in my commute to my 10 hour work days.

Knitting, oh, let’s talk about knitting. And the damn sweater. Have I told you about this sweater? Well, here goes…

I’m trying to remember when this started. You see, I started dating DH in 1994 and then we broke up and then got back together, and sometime in that period between 1994 and 1998, we bought some yarn in a store which no longer exists, called Placerville Yarns. It was a lovely yarn store, in a mountain town on the way to Lake Tahoe that I used to stop at when I lived in California whenever we went skiing. Anyway, I told DH I would knit him a sweater and he picked out some Lorna’s Lace’s Shepherd Sport in a lovely color way Pewter, and a complicated aran pattern which was to be knitted on size 4 needles. (To tell you how old this yarn is, Lorna still owned the company and dyed the yarn at her home in Placerville!)

Enter the problem. The pattern has errors. This is a raglan. Knitted in pieces. The pattern of the cables does not match up when the pieces are knit. There are cables that run up the front and the sleeves that look like arrows and they are to merge into each other. I think it only works in one pattern size of the instructions. I have knit and ripped out this sweater more than once. I have changed it and knit it in the round. I even asked Meg Swansen for advice about this sweater. So it gets knit again, and banished again, and knit again and banished again, back to a closed closet in the yarn room. And I know it’s been over a year since I re-knit it for the 4th time. And stopped again.

So, Saturday morning. I frogged it again. Yep, the WHOLE THING. This is a man’s 44 inch sweater. Knit 4 times. Frogged again. All the yarn had a day-long bath. It is now dried. Sunday, I cast on again, after converting the whole mess to a top down raglan, using the charts from the original pattern. I think the sleeve charts are the problem from the beginning.

I don’t like it. Back to the Frog Pond. Number 5.

I’m looking for a new pattern. I surrender.