Sweatah Weathah

A sweater is like life, you get nothing out of it that you don't put into it! --Marilyn Monroe

One of the ideas I'm really trying to embrace when I buy yarn is to try to buy enough to make a garment. When it's wool, I try really hard to make it a "sweater's worth." This is after several years of buying one or two skeins of something with the idea of making into "something" at some stage in the future. Some of those "somethings" are still living in the stash, and while I am determined to make sure they get used, I am trying really hard not to create that problem for myself with any current purchases.

Except sometimes that kinda backfires on me.

See exhibit A below: a "sweater's worth" of yarn that I purchased during an online sale from Wolesley Wool in my hometown of Winnipeg. This is Cascade 220 Sport which was on sale at some stage over the past year or so, but there were only limited quantities of each colour. After combining several colour patterns on my phone from the swatch photos, I came up with this combination. I ordered it, and when it arrived, I packaged it all together as a sweater project. I felt pretty good about it: for once, I pre-planned and I had an idea of how I wanted it to look. I mean, it was practically a finished sweater at this stage:

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago when the mornings began to get chilly and my arms were cold. I officially declared it "sweatah weathah." I pulled out the packaged skeins and wound them all into cakes... except something wasn't quite right. I just couldn't see that these colours really went together. Something was off. I mixed and matched and added and subtracted, and I finally came to the conclusion that the silver grey was just not the right neutral for the palette I'd chosen:

 

So I pursed my lips and went through the stash and realized I did not have anything else that would work. I sat back and thought for a while, and then I picked up the phone and called Mad About Ewe in Nanaimo and asked them if they had any Cascade 220 Sport in cream. And lo, the angels there answered yes, they did. So I went in and picked up six skeins and felt much better about the situation:

And I declare that it is all going well... perhaps even "according to plan." Imagine that:

I'm currently working on the sleeves so that I can add them on as I continue to knit raglan sleeves and shoulders. I'm trying to knit them both at the same time so that I can use the colours evenly, but given that I've never knit two sleeves at the same time before, it's kind of slow going. We'll see how that all works out. I'm feeling confident...

Except now I have less than a "sweater's worth" of yarn in silver grey. Dang it. I guess I'll figure out that situation another time. Oh well.

I'm off to do some knitting. have a great week.