fussy AND time-consuming!

It is not all blankets and sewing all the time around here, I promise. (Except for I have maybe, a little bit, been fantasizing about English Paper Piecing and all of the beautiful fussy handwork I could do.)

I’m about to embark on a fairly stressful three weeks for Real Life, and it’s going to involve a lot of travel. Going in, I wanted to make sure that I had enough knitting to hold me through the whole block of time, and for that to happen, I had a few criteria:

1) Bigger project – something that would take more than two weeks of substantial knitting time to finish.

2) Portable – I need to be able to travel easily with the half-finished project and all the yarn I might need for it in a carry-on bag.

3) Easy. There is a time and a place for complicated heirloom lace shawls; this will not be it.

I’ve settled on Paulie. It’s a fine-gauge cardigan, in fingering-weight yarn, because apparently one sweater was not enough to get that out of my system.

After washing and hanging my swatch, I discovered that my gauge is much smaller than the original pattern gauge (7.33 spi instead of 6.5), and having learned a valuable lesson about not listening to gauge swatches, I decided to trust it. I kind of love the fabric I get when I knit this on the needles the pattern calls for, and didn’t really want the extra drape I’d get by going up a needle size or two.

Modifying this involved doing a bunch of math, but I think I’m a better person for it.

It’s given me some fairly daunting stitch counts – and I plan to try it on a lot to be sure that I haven’t made a mistake in calculating them, because big numbers make me instictively mistrustful – but I think it’ll work out the way I’d like.

And it’ll definitely take me longer than three weeks, which is the important thing.