Rain, rain

Today was a wet and blustery day -- the kind that makes me want to curl up inside on a window seat in a bay window with a hot cup of tea and a good book. While I lack for both the window seat and the bay window, I did stay inside for most of the day and caught up a bit on my reading (did I happen to mention that I love acquiring books?). I managed to squeeze in some knitterly activity as well.
First of all, I overcame my dread of blocking (it’s really not so bad after all!). A box of T-pins, a few pricked fingers, and some steam got me from this

to this

which, by midweek, will hopefully turn into this.

Now I’m in a bit of a quandary. I intentionally finished the top edge of the sweater in purple (my favorite color strip of the skeins) but now that I matched it up to the sleeve edges, I’m not sure if I like the strong color contrast. I’m leaning towards seaming the front and back upside down so that the brown/dark green edge is at the top as in the picture below. (The picture is much brighter than the one above as I finally gave up on trying to get my dratted camera to produce a focused image without the flash.)

What do you think?

This is when I wish I still had roommates. It is much easier to drag another person over to give you an opinion when they live in the same house.

My second knitterly act was to start the fiery bolero. (Funny, the camera/light now makes the yarn look red...it's really a dullish tangerine orange, I swear.)


This is the first time I have worked with non-wool/alpaca yarn and I’m not sure if I like it. The Cathay untwists and splits very easily as threads making up the fiber have nothing to hold them together. In the first few rows, I was constantly inserting my needle in the middle of a strand or losing a thread of yarn during a stitch so that it then stuck out of the fabric. This hasn’t happened as much now that I am more rows into the piece…perhaps it had to do with how I cast on?
Tomorrow promises to be even more rainy and miserable. Boo.