Instead of being a responsible student and working on my Melville essay, I watched a lot of Buffy and knit a sleeve and a neck band this weekend. I ran into my friend and he asked me, “What did you do this weekend? Work on stuff?”
I said, “Nah. I watched a crap ton of Buffy and did some power knitting and pattern writing.”
To which he replied, “So you worked all weekend?”
It’s nice that my friends realize that my design stuff is real work because I already have a hard time conceptualizing knitting as work when it doesn’t feel like a drudgery. Pattern grading? That’s work. Knitting a sweater? That doesn’t feel like work to me even though it’s part of my pattern writing process.

I usually work the sleeves and neckband in the same order when I knit sweaters. I always knit the neckband last for some reason, but I put this one on after I knit my second sleeve so I could try my sweater on with clothing. While I own a lot of things that go with orange, I had a specific dress in mind when I came up with this design, but I was worried that the neckline would be too low on my sweater. Pleasantly, this neckline almost perfectly matches the one on my dress and my dress doesn’t peek out awkwardly. I always find myself trying my half knit sweaters on with different outfits when things start to come together. Do you ever do that? It seems to help me get through the last chunk of knitting because I get excited about the project all over again when I start to think about how I’ll get to use my FO.

I finished the body and today I’m hoping to get started on the sleeves. I haven’t worked out the math for those yet so I’m not sure if I’ll actually get to do any knitting today, but I’m hopeful.

I like how the body turned out, but it’s not entirely what I planned. I was over cautious with the neckline because I didn’t want it to be restrictive after I add the neck band and now it’s a bit deeper than what I intended. I like it despite that, but it means that I can’t play around with a funnel neck like I was hoping to. Funnel necks have been on my brain lately even though I’m fairly convinced that I’m not built right to pull one off. I had been planning on putting one of the sweater to see what it looked like and then ripping back and doing a normal ribbed neck band.

I really need to come up with a name for this sweater. I was thinking of naming it after a character from Nero Wolfe because I was watching A&E’s Nero Wolfe when I sketched and swatched for this, but Lily Rowan is kind of the only female character in those. Any suggestions would be welcome.

I was motoring along on my orange pull over and I got to the point where I cast on the underarms to join everything in the round. I worked a round or two and then I noticed that my knitting was strangely twisted. I figured that I had joined it in the round wrong so I ripped back a few rounds and tried to straighten things out. I kept twisting my knitting around and around and it stayed strange. I finally realized that I had joined the neckline with the shoulders twisted. I didn’t want to frog the front yet again, so I picked apart the stitches I had picked up and put them on stitch holder.

I left them dangling for awhile, but they got annoying so I sewed the top of the sleeve back up. I didn’t do a proper grafting job so they’re not perfectly identical. The one under my thumb is the slapped together seam. The stitches on the front lay strangely, but I don’t think it’s too noticeable. I’m thinking of just leaving it like that because I’m lazy and I want to get the body finished this week instead of fussing over a small detail.