I’ve got a birthday deadline coming up in a little less than 2 weeks– and look how far ahead of the game I am!  The knitting part of Ian’s sweater is done and now I’m blocking it.  Once it is dry I can sew in the zipper.  This may be my most favorite knitting project to date.  It really will be so cute on him once it’s done, because it was already super cute in it’s strings-hanging-off crumpled and curled state.

This is the pattern I used from Petite Purls.  I really wanted to use the Spud & Chloe yarn it called for because I had looked at it and felt its machine washable softness several times at the yarn store.  I knew it would be expensive, but I didn’t realize that it was going to be a full $16.00 for a 50 gram skein.  Multiply that by the 7 skeins I was going to need and, well, it was just more than I could spend on a sweater for one child (especially when I have lofty hopes of knitting for all 5 of them this year).  With a little internet searching I stumbled upon Jimmy Bean’s Wool and it has this cool feature where you can search yarn by weight.  I found the Spud & Chloe yarn I wanted and compared all the yarns in similar weights.  I ended up getting 5 skeins of Cascade 128 superwash.  It was so soft and silky to knit with and cost about half as much as it would have otherwise.  It was a bit lighter than the called for yarn, so I had to knit it on size 10.5 needles instead of 11, which meant I just needed to knit the number of stitches for a size 6 and use the measurements for a 4 to make it turn out right.  I’m curious to see how it wears.  The Knit Picks Swish superwash I used for both my mom’s and Hunter’s sweaters gets a bit pilly with use.

Once I get the zipper in it will be torture to not put it on him until his birthday.

And I need to find a fun zipper pull.