. . . but I can’t bring myself to actually finish it. What the hell is up with that?

I finished the knitting on the hood for Rogue, and to be completely honest — that’s when this sweater felt done. Never mind the ridiculous amount of work that was still left to be done at that point, I still got up and did my happy dance.

Then I set about the work of grafting the hood. I’d been dreading this part, because who really does grafting well? (Hint: not me.) And — in a combination of knit and purl? Over cables? I will admit, I considered taking the easy way out and doing a 3-needle-bind off. Because a neat, well-crafted, pretty unobtrusive seam would be better than a mangled, ugly grafting attempt, no doubt. But I decided to keep that in my pocket as a “what to do if you screw this up beyond words” option and got started on the grafting process.

I looked around, both on the internet and in my library of printed resources (which grows bigger all the time, and I don’t understand how that happens), and the very best instructions I could find were in Montse Stanley’s Knitter’s Handbook. So I opened it up, put all my live stitches on crochet thread, and took a deep breath:

Then started working:

Okay, this isn’t turning out so bad, only had to redo a couple of stitches, about halfway done now and still able to breathe:

Done with the grafting of live stitches to live stitches (notice my blue thread is still in there; my security blanket):

Just gotta graft these live stitches onto this edge here:

and DONE!

I’m pretty proud of how I did. I found it much easier to do well with the stitches off the needles like this, rather than keeping them on the needles and holding the needles parallel, which is how I’d done all grafting before I had the esteemed Montse Stanley to tell me, quite emphatically, to never do it that way. (Ole Montse was right; this way is better.)

I have to admit, though, I did have some help:

Guinny (short for Guinevere) came in from playing in the sandbox and immediately offered her services as superviser. She did a great job, too. (My apologies for the photo. High ISO, too much noise, and on this computer screen it looks desperately oversharpened. I’m on a laptop away from home so I can’t fix it now.)

So, what’s left for Rogue? She’s practically done. I need to knit the applied I-cord border on the front edges, then just blocking, seaming, and installing the zipper (see how cavalier that sounds? Did I fool you, or can you tell that I’m shaking I’m so afraid of screwing things up at this point?). I should say, in the interest of full disclosure, that I need to knit the applied I-cord border AGAIN. You see, I did it once already. And after finishing the first side, I blindly (stupidly? incomprehensibly?) ignored what anyone could see — that it was puckering — and knit the other side, picking up the same ratio of stitches, knitting with the same size needle. Grafted the ends of the second cord — I was well and truly FINISHED, folks — and then gave up the self-delusion and ripped it all out to start over.

I started by picking up 2 out of 3 stitches, as indicated by Claudia’s most excellent cardigan modifications, but for whatever dumbass reason, that looked kind of “off” to me. (I don’t know why I’m all the sudden not trusting Claudia, who’s only done this twice so far and has been knitting a lot longer and knits a lot better than me, when I’ve been trusting her all along, but there it is. Just an attack of dumbass, as far as I can tell.) So instead I picked up 1 out of 2 stitches, because that “looked better.” Dumbass.

Now that all that has been ripped, I did the first side again — this time, picking up 2 out of 3 stitches all the way down, then doing the edging with a size 9 (US) needle (the sweater has been done on size 7s). It looks, if I do say so, gorgeous.

And I just have to do the other side.

And I just can’t seem to get there.

But. Hope springs eternal. I am away from home (visiting my Mom and Dad on the other side of Houston) and my family is going out for sushi for dinner tonight. I’m hoping to con them into taking my kiddo with them, so I will have a free evening, and be able to finish this edging. We’ll see.

I’ll leave you with images from my husband’s garden. (This is part of the reason I’m not finishing Rogue. It’s lovely outside, and Nate and I are spending a lot of time out there. This isn’t a bad thing.) He planted irises because I like them — and I like them very much.