Dances With Yarn: Getting Back To Normal

Well, I thought I'd take a break from the "hurricane" and "neurotic dog" blogging and blog a little about knitting for a change. So here goes. This is what I did today. I made a Knit and Tonic style dress form out of duct tape. I say "I made it", but actually, I just stood there while He Who Wears Levi's wrapped me up. At first, I thought I'd be really ingenious and make a form with arms, but wasn't ingenious enough to remember that I wouldn't be able to get a sweater on a dress form with arms that wouldn't bend (or possibly even with arms that did bend), so the arms came off. Actually, the real reason the arms came off was because about 15 minutes after HWWL taped up my arms, I looked down at my hands and saw that they had turned the most beautiful shade of purple. Emergency surgery had to be done to the dress form to remove the arms as quickly as possible so that I could get circulation in my hands again.

I remember reading on Wendy's blog a while back a post asking "when can you call it your very own?" (Can you tell I like Wendy's blog?) Her readers had lots of differing views on when you can call a pattern your own, but even after reading their comments, I'm not sure I know the answer to that question. The reason I'm now asking the same question is because I "sort of" designed a sweater. I think. Basically, it's a combination of a few different patterns that I've already seen, using a different yarn in a different gauge. Essentially, this sweater is Stefanie Japel's Easy V-Neck Raglan sweater with cables added to the front, the back, and the sleeves. The idea for the cables came from Rachel's Tube Toporini pattern. The neck, sleeves, and bottom will all have matching trim of some sort... not exactly sure what style of trim I'll use just yet. These top down raglans are easy, lots of fun, and they can be modified in lots of different ways. Anyway... I wrote the pattern down as I went so if anybody's interested in having a copy, they're welcomed to it. Hopefully this sweater will be complete within a couple of days with more pics posted at that time. So with yet another project on the needles, things must be getting back to normal around here ;-)