What a Difference a Sleeve Makes

"Only today," he said, "today, in October sun, it’s all gold—sky and tree and water. Everything just before it changes looks to be made of gold." --Eudora Welty, The Wide Net and Other Stories

Ah October... I love this time of year. I love the colours, the cooler weather, and how the sun becomes a source of delicious warmth instead of the harsh beam of death that it was in the summer. October turns every forest path into a hall of wonder:

It also means a return to regular baking. I have recently become interested (read: obsessed) by Wool Bread, which is a pillowy, light dough cut and rolled to resemble rolls of wool yarn with some kind of filling inside. Wool and bread? Of course I was gonna give that a go:

It was a bit of a faff to get it started, as I always have trouble proofing yeast with milk and this dough uses both milk and cream. I also thought it would be a pain to cut all those strips to make it look "woolly," but once I got started it was actually pretty easy. I don't think mine looks all that much like yarn, but it sure tasted great. I filled it with cinnamon and brown sugar and it was like a lovely, soft, pillowy cinnamon roll. I'm for sure trying that one again sometime:

In the meantime, I have made great progress on my current sweater experiment. I finished the sleeves and have gone back to the bottom edge to continue knitting downwards with the silver grey yarn. I'm hoping to get a nice, long cardi out of this:

The only thing is that I've been bouncing back and forth about which side should be the "right" side showing out. As of last week, I was quite convinced that the reverse stockinette side should be the right side, but when I finished the first sleeve and looked at the reverse side, I wasn't all that enamoured with it:

And then I flipped it back to the stockinette side and was much happier with the look of it. It's amazing the difference a finished sleeve makes. Witchcraft, I tell you. Spells and abracadabrara:

You might be wondering why I'm so tied up in knots about this decision, but the anxiety over this really comes from the fact that I have a lot of ends to weave in due to all the stripes. I hate waiting to weave in ends because it's such a tedious chore. I prefer to get it done as I go, but until I know which side is going to be the right side I have to wait because I have to figure out where I am going to hide all those tails.

There is the option to make it into a fully reversible cardigan, but there are a lot of things to consider when doing that: how am I going to hide the tails so that they can't be seen on both sides? What about the ugly ridge that will appear when I pick up and knit the neck and fronts? How will I hide that? I also want to knit a hood... how will I keep it from having a pointy gnome tip?

I suppose I'll have to wait and see how I feel about it when I finish the bottom part. I suspect this is going to be more work than I intended, but that's always why I call them sweater experiments: I have no idea how it's all going to turn out.

It's Canadian Thanksgiving today. We had our turkey et. al last night. It was tasty and made me sleepy and I am quite happy to have a simpler dinner tonight. I'm grateful to have your eyes on my blog today. I never quite know where these words go once I put them into cyberspace, but if you're here with me today, thanks for taking the time out of your day to spend time with me. It means a great deal more than you know.

Have a good week!