862 yards: impressive

I'm closing in on using up the first (of two) balls of Stylecraft "Special" that I bought to do the Potter cardigan with.



That's the back, both fronts, and the beginning of a sleeve. And I still have a goodly bit of yarn left. (I will certainly need to dip into the second ball, however: the sleeves are fairly wide, as is typical of coat-sweaters, and then there's also a collar that gets knit on at the end).

I'm happy, though, I kind of feel like I've crossed the Rubicon on this one. (I know, I know, other knitters: don't speak of being stranded on 'sleeve island' to me). For one thing, the sleeves are super easy until the shaping of the cap - they're wide, un-shaped sleeves once I've finished the ribbing and done a few decreases, so I can just motor along until I hit the cap shaping. (One of the things that held me back from working more on the right front was that I had to remember to do the sleeve decreases AND remember to measure so I'd know where to put in the buttonholes AND THEN do the neck decreases. And that's reversing all the shaping that was laid out in detail for the left front. (Heh. It's kind of like Ginger Rogers' comment that she did everything Astaire did, just backwards and in heels)

One HUGE benefit of knitting the bits of a sweater off an enormous ball of yarn: far, far fewer ends to weave in - it'll just be the cast-on/bind-off ends, the one place where I join in the new ball, and then the ends of the yarn I use to sew up the sweater. (I may raid my sock-yarn stash and find a matching sock-yarn for sewing up: it will be less bulky.)

I'm thinking I can finish this by the end of the summer, and then look forward to a new sweater project. (The Hampton Cardigan, for which I just bought yarn, may leapfrog to the front of the line: for one thing, I'm excited about the color, and for another, the cardigan has a very different style of construction: it is knit in all one piece, from the back hem up, then there are additional stitches cast on for each sleeve, then you bind off for the neckline, then you knit down each front to the front hem. The front bands are attached later, I think. The design is such that it gives an uninterrupted flow of the vine-lace pattern. I like it because there's less seaming, and no fiddling with setting in sleeves.)