but I’m going to work really hard to be better at it.

The good news is that in spite of not blogging, I have been knitting. In fact, the knitting itself is one of the reasons I haven’t been blogging — it’s too hard to pull myself away from the knitting just to write about knitting!

But I know that I’m going to really regret it eventually if I don’t keep a good record of what I’m doing. And, with all the photos involved, a pen-and-paper record just doesn’t (for once!) seem like the best solution to me. So . . . I’m going to work very hard to keep up with this.

On to the knitting news. The biggest knitting is that I “finished” Nate’s sweater! I’m so completely proud of myself about this. I still have to put in the zipper and weave in the ends, but all the knitting and seaming are done. And it actually looks like a sweater, amazingly enough!

Here it is:

And in action:

He seems to really like it:

The fit seems to be good in most respects, to the degree that it’s possible to evaluate how something is going to fit a growing little boy six months down the road. I am a bit worried that it’s going to be too short, but I’m hoping that I can block it a little longer. I’m anticipating that he’ll lose some of his impressive little Buddha belly, and if he does, I think it will be plenty long enough.

Seaming was terrifying, but overall I think it went pretty well. I’m not completely impressed with the shoulder seams:

but I’m quite happy with how the side seams turned out:

Once again, I discovered that the best instructions I found for what I wanted to do were in the Sally Melville books. (I much prefer real live books for things like that instead of online tutorials. If it’s online, I have to print it out; I just can’t follow step-by-steps off the screen. I’m wired funny that way.) Her explanations and the illustration photos were just excellent, and made me feel like I had a wise friend there holding my hand.

The shoulder seams are much more “defined” than I thought I wanted, but once I put the sweater on him, I realized that I actually rather like the sharp seam line on the shoulder. It makes the sweater seem to fall nice and neatly, and I don’t think that would be the case with a less defined shoulder seam. So I’m not unhappy with the way those seams turned out.

I’m very nervous about doing the zipper, but I keep telling myself I was really nervous about doing the seaming too, and that turned out okay, so I should just get over myself and go on with the zipper. Maybe I’ll tackle that tomorrow.

In other knitting news, I am working on a pair of socks for my mother (the Retro Rib socks from the winter 2004 Interweave Knits) and just started Branching Out from the spring Knitty, in Kidsilk Haze (green, but I don’t remember the exact name of the color). I’ve had to rip both several times. I am loving lace knitting — but I pretty much figured I would.

Once I have some reasonable progress on either of those projects, I’ll post pics.