The Knitting Fiend

Jim likes the yarn I bought at The Yarn Exchange in Dekalb, so his green-black-white marl sweater is a “go”. I bought plenty of yarn this time, over two pounds. I won’t run out like I did with Jim’s earlier raglan sweater.

Of course, as with most of the discount coned yarn I use, it’s a mystery yarn. I’m not too bad at guessing how a yarn will knit up when I examine a cone, but I can’t be certain. My first guess was to try machien tension setting 8, but it required a tension setting of 10. After knitting and steaming, the swatch seems like a “hard wearing outerwear” type yarn as opposed to a “comfy next to your skin” swatch. I think the marl yarn spans the “formal to casual” range engineers often need if they work in a casual office, and sometimes need to go out to the production line or, as in Jim’s case, the field. (Where he sometimes has to remove spider webs, dirt and assorted gunk from radiometers.) All in all, I’m a happy camper; this yarn is perfect for the type of sweater I want to knit Jim this time.

As some of you know, I like hand knitting one weekends and machine knitting on weekdays. Tomorrow’s Friday, and Saturday is almost here. So, I also need to go to Knitche! in Downers Grove and get some hand knitting yarn to make Jim a comfy/cozy indoor sweater. I can start coding a “bottom up hand knit raglan” pattern generator tomorrow, and try to make progress on a hand knit sweater over the weekend.

I’m thinking I’ll buy olive colored yarn for the hand knit sweater, but I know myself. I tend to change my mind when I get to the store. I guess we’ll see if I stick with that when I visit the LYS.