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.

Yesterday the UPS man brought me some new toys!

I’ve gotten very ambitious in my knitting aspirations after my Christmas gift accomplishments and Hunter’s birthday sweater.  I have this goal in the back of my mind that I will knit something spectacular for each of my kids’ birthdays, something for myself, and maybe even get ambitious enough to knit something for Barry too.  7 or 8 sweaters in a year is totally doable? Right?

With a goal like that there is sure to be a lot of yarn in my future– and every crafty endeavor is much more fun with the right tools.

Hand wound balls are a bit fumbly and tangly to make from big loopy skeins, and bit fumbly and tangly to knit from.  With a swift you can easily hold that big loop of yarn.

And with a ball winder you can make speedy work of creating a perfect center pull ball that behaves so nicely as you knit without rolling away or tangling up.

With all the spinning and winding that could be done it was quite a while until the kids let me have a turn to try out my new toys.

I did get a turn after a couple of balls were wound– and then admired how neatly they stack on my craft shelves.  So satisfying.

Oh, and my silk screen class post is over at the Rhythm of the Home blog today. Here’s a BIG welcome to any new friends stopping by!