Two (mostly) down, three to go…

Behold! The glory that is the (mostly) finished sweater for Boo Bug:



That’s right! Last night, while Brian Williams told me just how rotten things were around the globe, I knuckled down and finished the collar! Yay, me! I’m so-so proud of me, because Danger Mouse’s sweater is in full swing and I’m on the part that is so utterly mindless (go around and around and around in one color until it measures 27 centimeters) that it becomes the default knitting of choice whenever my attention is divided; whereas the ‘pick up X stitches per Y centimeters, making sure the final number is divisible by 6+1’ thing is a little…more…uh…

Well. Let’s tell it like it is: even if I had been giving the project my full and undivided attention (and nothing has gotten my full and undivided attention since about 1994), I couldn’t possibly have hit that dead on. So I picked up as many stitches as seemed to make sense, focusing more on making sure I was picking up neatly, evenly, and in a manner that wouldn’t cause a pucker around the collar, then counted them, divided by six, and when I did the first row added in the two stitches I needed to get to ‘divisible by 6+1’.

Yes.

I cheated.

I am shameless. Sue me. It works and I’m pretty sure that nobody will ever pick it up, look at the collar and say, “Ah-HA! I see you used a simple backward loop to add a stitch! Here! And here! SINNER! Thou didst not pick up a multiple of 6, plus one! GET THEE BEHIND ME!!!”

I’m pretty sure, anyway.

My favorite part about this sweater has got to be the picot edging at the bottom of the sweater and the cuffs of the sleeves. It just charms the socks off me.

The only thing I’m not particularly thrilled about is likely my fault – I don’t like the way the placket ended up. It looks OK, but when you feel it…it’s thick, and a bit lumpy. While it does provide a certain rigidity to the opening, I’m not sure I like it there. “Sweater” and “rigid” just don’t go together, according to my lexicon.

Oh. Hey. This reminds me. I did take pictures of the cutting process. Here’s the first thing you do, whump up your favorite kind of this:



(This is vodka, peach schnapps, orange and (real, unsweetened, not-cocktail) cranberry juices.)

Then, to do the steeks, you run some machine stitches along the outer edges and cut right up between them, like this:



Then sit down with that first thing and calm your nerves a bit.

Now that all this part is done, all I need to do is get the clasps on it. If all goes according to plan (stop laughing – I can totally hear you!), I’ll get those on tonight.

Then Boo Bug can wear it to school tomorrow.

And by this time tomorrow, it’ll be crammed under the seat of the van or forgotten in the school play yard – this being the way Boo Bug expresses her ‘I will love it forever and ever’ feelings toward everything from French fries to stuffed animals.