I finished knitting the Whisper Cardigan last night, and the end result is an "ugh" I think. I'm not wild about the blue, since I'm in a total drab/neutral phase right now.
I'm going to need to do the bind off over again, but am feeling bummed about the project so I'll need to let it stew in time out for a few days. Some people on Ravelry have suggested doing a tubular bind off, since that is supposedly more elastic than other types. If I do that, then I will have learned three new things, which probably makes the project worth it in the end. The other two are 1) that it is vastly better to pick up dropped stitches with a crochet hook than with the knitting needles (I dropped
a lot of stitches on this project) and 2) how to wrap the end stitches on short rows so that you don't get a hole in the fabric.
It is with great gusto that I tore into the next project, yet another sweater that
everyone on Ravelry has knit, the Gathered Pullover from
Interweave Knits.
I don't really have a good answer as to why I keep knitting the same things that everyone else is knitting. I suppose it's partly because they are appealing designs and partly because I consciously or unconsciously want to share in some kind of group experience. At any rate, I think this will be the last of knitting super popular projects for a while, and I can go back to my life of the obscure.
Today was a brilliant day, 24 celsius and beaming sunshine (hence the terrible photographs from 8pm this evening). I walked down to the ferry this morning, which is a brisk 25-minute walk, and had all sorts of ideas bubbling in my head. I'm pleased that the living room is starting to come together, and even more pleased that KE has agreed to go furniture shopping tomorrow.
KE and I had a rousing (at times strained) two day discussion trying to define what "art" is. He had that as an assignment for his
last ever undergraduate course (yay!), which just started this week. It is fascinating and a little distressing how good we are at talking past each other some times! But as always, it ended up being stimulating and satisfying.
It's been raining like crazy the past few days, so a little bit of cabin fever is setting in. I've been going back and forth between reading (I'm now onto the last of the trilogy, Den sidste Glæde) and knitting on the tenth NaKniSweMoDo sweater. It's another Garnstudio pattern, a short sleeved cardigan with an eyelet pattern using the Silke-Tweed that I bought on sale a few months back. I've got the sleeves done and about 4 inches on the body (it's knitted in one piece back and forth). I had to go down from 3.5 to 2.5 mm needles to get gauge, and I'm still a bit worried that it will billow. We'll just have to see. Here's how it looks right now:
I got all the papers for the panel I'm going to participate in at the conference in Stockholm next month. I was excited to see that I get to be the "opponent" for the paper on Kerstin Ekman's Händelser vid vatten, which is one of my very favorite novels. I couldn't resist re-reading my own paper, and I got kind of impulsive and decided to just shoot it off to a level two journal for review. I have no idea whether there will be a conference proceedings volume, but thinking strategically it makes sense to get it out under review now rather than after the conference, since the process takes so long. Maybe I should have waited for the feedback from the panel, but I can always incorporate that in the revisions if it is actually of use.
