(Finished knitting and assembling at the end of June, 2009; finally wove in all the tails in October, 2009.)

The pattern calls for a variegated yarn and a solid, but I couldn’t find a variegated yarn in colors I really wanted, or at a price that didn’t scare me. Instead, I went with a denim-ish blue as the color, paired with black, for a casual sweater that’s still respectable and won’t--I hope--cause flare-ups in migraine sufferers or seizures in small children.

My sizing for this project was all over the place: I thought I had a good gauge swatch, but I started knitting the back and discovered it was too wide, then recalculated, started over, and wound up too narrow. At first I thought I would just block it to the right size, then I decided instead to add little panels at the sides. The pattern itself helps hide the add-on parts.

This is the first sweater I’ve wet-blocked, and it was the Amityville Horror: the sleeves--one, especially-- tried to grow to baboon length, and the whole thing stayed damp for days. I tried to smoosh and coax the sleeves back to normal length, and they’re almost right, but still a smidge longer than I want, when they were so perfect to begin with; it was the body that needed the blocking. That turned out fine.