A finished Vivian!

Pictures are worth lotsa words right? Well I hope it's obvious that I've got one happy camper of a best friend. 

 

I actually had a lot of unexpected fun putting in the zipper. I used Grumperina's tutorial, which I think was the one that Ysolda recommended. For one thing, it was a lot easier than I expected. Word-of-mouth on zippers had me thinking they were the bane of a knitters existence, with many people employing the help of their seamstress friends to do the finishing work for them.

Personally, I have no idea how someone could do that. I wasn't even gonna let my mother get her hands on this thing. Don't care that she's got the fancy sewing machine and a few decades of experience... that zipper was the cherry on top of my awesome project sundae and I am SO glad I just went for it and tackled it with confidence, because it came out swimmingly.

Of course, it is kind of silly to give someone the nicest, prettiest, most coveted, superwash merino on the market, and then go, "please don't put this in your washing machine, because then you'll probably be calling me to fix the zipper!"

Now in addition to working on the Cassis cardigan, I am swatching away for the next one that is a commission piece for a friend of my mom. Another Aran style, Vivian-esque with waist shaping that is incorporated into the big front cable.

I tried altering a cable from Melissa Leapman's Cables Untangled and wasn't very happy with it... so I ripped that sucker out. I've been to the library many times in the last couple weeks and my head is a sort of jumble of possible cable candidates right now. I have a tendency to not make up my mind until after a project is really in progress. This just means I seem crazy to my non-knitter spectators, because I always seem to be knitting and ripping out.

Lately it seems like I have an FO... like about as often as you see a UFO because hat designing has not been kind to my brain. If you look at my blog entry from back in May you'll see the hat I was trying to design... emphasis on the trying. It makes me crazy to not be able to just get a hat done in a few days, trying to make up a complex cable pattern for this one was biting off a bit more than I am capable of chewing... I think I need to stop trying to chart my cables with increases and decreases included BEFORE I knit it. I need to knit it and THEN chart it, and then knit it again to make sure the chart is right. I don't think I'm capable of knitting and charting at the same time even though I convinced myself it would work much better that way. What I do know is I can knit up a pretty damn good hat design fairly quickly if I don't think about it so hard, or spend the whole time telling myself not to let it get too complicated.