23 April: Started the Tempest on Shakespeare’s birthday, which seems appropriate. This is my first cardigan. I hope I have the patience to finish it! I’m starting with the sleeves, and doing a provisional cast-on in case I decide I want to make them longer than the pattern specifies.

29 April: First sleeve finished. I’m not getting a lot of chance to knit, in between keeping up with Small J and other household distractions. I like the colors, though; the stormy blue-grey-green looks nice with the slightly mossy green-brown.

15 May: Have finished the second sleeve. It appears reasonably well-matched with the first one. Go me!

19 May: Got a surprising amount of knitting time in the last few days, and am about a third of the way done with the back.

24 May: Finished the back!

27 May: Done with the left half of the front, have cast on the right half. Man, I’m going to be glad when I’m done with this thing.

30 May: All pieces are now knit. Time for weaving-in ends, sewing together, blocking, finishing, etc.

9 June: I ended up adding another wide stripe to the sleeves, plus a bit of ribbing with a tubular cast-off. This involved learning to graft, which took a day of teeth-grinding frustration, but now I know how to do it and I’m sort of pleased about that. Sewing seams is horrible, though. Next time I’m going to pick a pattern that’s not in so many separate pieces.

13 June: Dammit dammit dammit. I was well into sewing down the hem when I realized that I hadn’t picked up quite enough stitches at the bottom corners of the button band. I suppose the curling and general wonkiness of the edge misled me into thinking that some of the side stitches were bottom stitches, but they were’t, and so the bottom of the band has these two weird little notches. I spent a bunch of today picking apart the sewn bind-off. Maybe tomorrow I can finish that, unravel the whole business, and try again. I wish I’d done the hem first.

16 June: DONE. Except I still need to find buttons. And I should block the whole thing, mostly to smooth out the transition where I lengthened the sleeves. Hopefully I’ll get to take some pictures soon.

18 June: Buttons are finished, yay. It’s been too miserably hot to even think of putting the thing on for pictures, though.

29 June: Hooray hooray for one cool day.