Something Wicked This Way Comes

An observant reader might have noticed that I've been knitting a lot of sweaters lately.

Yup, I live in the desert. Summer has just arrived bringing with it temperatures of over 100 degrees. And I'm knitting sweaters.

An observant reader might also have noticed that I don't appear to have any new yarn coming in so to speak. That's right. I've been stash diving.

Now my stash has never been particularly big. I buy yarn with a project in mind, knit the project, and wonder what to do with the tiny left-over balls. But every once in a while I get lots and lots of yarn just because its pretty. It would appear I've run out of pretty yarn. I've still got sock yarn. I've got sock yarn for at least another seven, maybe twelve pairs of socks. But sweater quantities of yarn? Not so much.

To appease my inner sweater knitter yesterday I found myself knitting this

Yup.

This.

This is the only sweater size quantity of yarn in my stash.

One might recognise this as dun, dun, duuuuuuuuuuunnnnnnnnnn: Evil. This project first made its debut here . Yes. I do realize that would be March of 2005, over four years ago. My oldest work-in-progress (not counting the children).

I don't want to drag up painful knitting memories, but I feel some explanation is required for those of you who haven't been hanging on my every word for the past four years (have I really been blogging that long?!!!). A brief synopsis of this project looks like this: My husband choose the World's Twine-iest Most Painful Yarn EVER(tm) and told me to knit him a sweater and then refused to find a pattern he liked. No. This mythical perfect sweater must be conjured out of thin air using yarn that actually removes the skin from my fingers as I knit. And it must be perfect.

But no pressure there.

I once made him a quilt. We carefully chose each fabric together, picking out just the perfect color combinations to create each square. It took me a months to piece the top, hand stitching the entire thing. Then it sat. I couldn't decide if I wanted to hand quilt it or tye it. He wanted it tyed but it seemed like sacrilege to tye a hand sewn quilt. So it sat. For five years it sat. Finally The Greatest decided to take matters into his own hands and tye the darn thing himself. Which he did. And now he uses that quilt almost everyday. He teases me that he's going to have to give up and knit his own sweater as well.

As I approach the five year mark with this sweater I've decided I need to suck it up and knit. I'm using Leo as a pattern guide. In a perfect world I would just be able to knit this pattern but The Greatest wants 3x2 ribbing not 5x3 ribbing, and yes, it does make a difference (in his mind it makes a difference). And the collar isn't right. And he doesn't want it to be that fitted (although he'd look so good with it fitted like that). But it is HIS sweater, so I suppose I should knit what he wants to wear, not what I want to knit.

I've decided to surprise him with this sweater, so he can't know I'm knitting this. One would think it might be difficult to secretly knit a sweater for someone you live with, but it turns out its not. I can blog about it because he doesn't read my blog. The summer has started and there is the ever elusive off-duty work to be found (HALLELUJAH), so it turns out there are hours and hours and hours and days and days and days where I won't see him. Plenty of time to knit a sweater.

Of course I must have a decoy project to knit when he is around, because if I sat around not knitting he would know something was up.

I've got it all covered.

P.S. SEND MORE YARN!