It's a sleeve!

I finished the first sleeve of Potter last night.



This is a pretty extreme raglan sleeve - though the good thing about that is you don't need a row counter once you hit the decreases, you just decrease each end every knit row until you're down to two stitches, then you knit those together and finish it off.

I started the second sleeve and got a few rows of the ribbing done. I'm excited by this project again because it's so close to being done. Now I'll have to remember where I put the buttons I got for it. I may even have this done by mid-fall break. (Sadly, I am not going to Rhinebeck - I never get to go to Rhinebeck - so this won't really be a "Rhinebeck sweater.")

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Had a good piano lesson yesterday. Finished up with one piece and got to start something new. My teacher does a mix of exercises, classics, and contemporary pieces: typically, I have some kind of scale exercise, a piece from the Hated Exercise Book (I know they are good for technique but, for example, this past week's piece had me stretching over a full octave with my right hand for pretty much the entire piece - and I have fairly small hands so an octave's stretch starts to hurt after a while), a classical piece, and a modern piece.

Right now the two actual pieces I am working on is a Kirnberger bourrée (Kirnberger, apparently, was a student of J.S. Bach's. I had never heard of him before). And I just finished up a contemporary piece called "Reflections in the Moonlight." This is the piece where I think I finally got comfortable with playing with a light touch - my teacher commented that usually I play very "hard," and it's true, I do.

(I think this is one of those "how you do anything is how you do everything" situations. I'm sure it's because I tend naturally to be a somewhat tense person: when I hold a pencil or pen, I hold it tightly enough that it fatigues my hand after a while, and I have a callus on my right middle finger where the pen or pencil rests. And I confess to having broken the odd size-1 wooden double-pointed needle because of "gorilla grip," and a lot of my other needles of that size class are slightly curved).

The new piece I have is called "Skater's Dream" (It's by...Carol Klose). It's a very pretty piece and is marked "Intermediate." So I guess I know what level I'm at now...I guess "intermediate" isn't too bad for, what, 2 1/2 years (after a short period of lessons as a young teenager). Especially since I'm busy enough that I feel I can never quite give it the time it should deserve - and the fact that I'm older than most piano students. (I do think it's a lot easier to learn an instrument - and probably also a lot easier to learn languages - when you're a child rather than an adult). But then again, I have Motivation! on my side, and adult-level discipline (in that I sit down and do my daily practice even if I don't totally feeeeeeeeel like it.)