Sometimes the way to win a gold medal is to do a clean program without trying to throw all the super-fancy moves. This baby sweater fits the bill.

On Monday night I was ready to put the sleeves and body together.



I knit around (it was very tight!) and then it was connected.



This is what a proper sleeve join looks like. The held stitches are in the armpit:



And this is what an improper join looks like. The held stitches are on the shoulder:



Tink back the round, try again.

Eventually, I got this connected, and got into the pattern of decreasing for the v-neck and raglan. While Sasha Cohen was landing on her butt, I had this:



The buttons are from Vanessa's. Thanks to Angela for helping me find them.



Now that there are a few more days in the Olympics and I'm done, I think I'll try to knit that scarf that Christine wanted... and maybe a hat? Or maybe I'm setting myself up to fall on my butt in a combo attempt!

Off to Bakersfield this afternoon to see my parents. The kids will have fun (except for the long car drive...).

I attended Stitches West yesterday for the opening day of classes and the market.  I took Cable Ready with Melissa Leapman, which was a good beginner cable class.  I understood the idea of cables previously but it was really good to be forced to turn a whole bunch of them!  I came home with a nice set of swatches.


Melissa Leapman is a great teacher - I'd take anything with her.  Ada was in the class also - she wants to learn to do cabled socks, of course!

After class, I dealt with a mini-crisis at home via cell phone and then went to the mediocre hotel restaurant for dinner.  I was alone, but was adopted by two lovely women from Menlo Park and San Jose, whose names escape me.  They will be in my classes Sunday.

I made some progress on Davis's sweater, for the Knitting Olympics.  I'm less than 1/3 of the way through, however, and the Yarn Harlot's site tells me that we're 43% through the time.  Uh-oh.


And then, the market...  oh yes, the market.

I wasn't even going to hit the Woolstock booth, but a giant bin of 50% off yarn caught my eye.  And, I remembered that they had very nice long blocking wires last year, which sold out pretty quickly.  I bought some blocking wires and then some Noro...


Oh yeah, and more...


Yep, that's all Silk Garden.  And then, they also had this:



Now, how cool is that?  I have two balls, and I'm sure to make something for the 2006 BlackLight Ball.

That was just the Woolstock booth.

I skipped most of the left half of the market, and made a beeline for La Lana Wools.  Knitters Review recently wrote about their very cool Phat Silk yarn, and I can assure you it's just as gorgeous in person as you can imagine.  I thought about buying everything they had enough yarn for a sleeveless shell, but then figured out the price tag would have been over $100.  Yipes!  For a full sweater, maybe, but not for a little sleeveless top that you can hardly wear in frigid San Francisco!  I settled with two hanks, enough for a lovely scarf.




The teal color is really amazing, and I'm sure your computer monitor doesn't do it justice.

Off to Blue Moon Fiber Arts to get some of that famous Socks That Rock yarn...  the only hard thing at that booth was figuring out which color.  I picked Pebble Beach:



I might have to return Saturday or Sunday to get more.

I nearly forgot about Brooks Farm, which I had on my "must visit" list.  I picked up some, uh, I think it's Harmony - it's wool/silk/mohair in DK weight.  And, I grabbed from their "sale" bin.  I got 3 500-yard skeins at $27 each ($5 off usual):



The third hank is a grey-white-black mix, for a shawl or something.  The photo turned out horribly.  If you've never touched this yarn, you really need to check it out.  It's quite lovely.

Finally, I made my way to the Button Lady, who turns out to live in my neighborhood.  I wanted to introduce myself because I'd figured out that she lived nearby, and of course ended up with some buttons:



These buttons are made of malachite and are beautiful.  Never mind that I don't have a particular project in mind for them - I love the color and will buy yarn to match if I have to!

That's enough damage for a day, eh?  Today I'm going to work, finish my homework swatches, and try to catch up on my Olympics project, probably while watching the Olympics.

So... a baby sweater.  Ok.  I found a pattern on the web (raglan from the bottom up - not many seams!).  I printed it and packed it with my yarn, and it headed up to Lake Tahoe with me.  I cast on Friday evening, after dinner and skiing.  The pattern said to cast on 114 stitches, and while watching the telecast of opening ceremonies I got a couple of inches done.

The pattern said the measurement, with gauge of 22 stitches per 4 inches (5.5 sts per inch), should end up at 20.5 inches around the chest.  OK, that seems to work.  Except, I'm getting something like 4.7 sts per inch, putting me at about 24 inches around.  This is a toddler 18 months size, not an infant size!  Now I'm sure that Mommy Christine would be cool if Davis can't wear the sweater for over a year, but I entered this event for a baby sweater.  One does not enter the Super-G and decide to do a slalom after the gun has gone off.  So...

Frog, frog, frog.

That'll teach me to not do a proper gauge swatch before starting this type of event.

I adjusted 20% downward, and cast on 97 stitches.  And, I decided to add some stitches on each end so I could knit the button band along with the sweater in general, rather than pick it up later.  I'm wondering if I should have added a few more stitches because the overlap of the button band might make this more like 19 inches... on the other hand, the cotton is pretty stretchy and Davis is on the slender side.

Since I just finally caught up this morning with the number of stitches I'd frogged on Saturday morning, I'm happy to be as far along as I am now.  And I'm not frogging the darn thing again to add 5 stitches.

I'm about 3 inches up from the bottom, with about 3 more to go before casting on the sleeves...

 

For the Knitting Olympics, I am planning to do something for Baby Davis.  His mom, Christine, picked some lovely Cherry Tree Hill cotton-rayon boucle for an object for Baby.  However, she also quipped that she'd like a scarf for herself.

A scarf isn't an advanced enough event for me, but I've been thinking: rather than a baby sweater, should I knit a stole that also can be a baby blanket?

For training, I've been swatching the yarn, and a simple eyelet or feather-and-fan type of pattern would work nicely for a stole.  However, it's awfully hard to not knit something as cute as this.

So... I've asked Christine to pick my event: blanket/stole or baby sweater.

Which team will it be?

We'll know by Thursday.