Progress!

I'm working my way through my second sweater of this year, and it's coming along rather nicely. Okay, so technically I haven't blocked the first sweater, but I've finished the knitting and seaming parts. Honestly, I was overly anxious to get started on the beautiful Twist & Shout to take the time to clean off the futon so that I have a large enough space to block sweater numero uno, so that is still stilling in a pile in it's project bag.
It was easy for me to make the jump to the next sweater since Guy, the enabling loving man that he is, had gotten me a $100 gift card to one of the three LYSs. I popped over there to try to find the perfect yarn and with a little help from Mrskitch I picked out some Cascade 220 ins a pretty teal blue/green. I had thought when I was going in there that I wanted something neutral, grey, or black that could go with anything, but Cascade told me different!



I'm truly enjoying this pattern, especially the tapered decreases and increases, which seem so simple and beautiful at the same time. It's funny, I've always openly avoided sweaters but now that I've started doing some I'm realizing that they aren't so big and frightening as they had once seemed.


I was making some great headway on this sweater until I noticed that I had received packages in the mail from fellow knit knackers Fey, SeahagMary, and KrisKnits. With some guilt, I was reminded of the fact that I have a group project that I'm seriously behind on.
Last year my knitting group came up with a great idea: we would make a group blanket for each other, each knitting a 10x10 for the 24 other participants. Once all squares were received, we would all have a blanket make by each other to snuggle up under while knitting. This was a great project in theory (and honestly I am still excited to get to the final project) but has now been dubbed the Great Square Extravaganza (thank you Mary!). I've learned that knitters are fickle creatures when it comes to projects and yarn. We should have known that few of us would have the attention span required to make it through all of those squares, which after a while start resemble swatches (we all know how much knitters love those) without being distracted. This was a lesson learned after three extensions of the deadline. Lord knows I surly wasn't able to resist!
Begrudgingly, I'v set aside my sweater and picked up my squares again. The most recent deadline extension was the end of January so it goes without saying that I've missed that too. But, there is a light at the end of the tunnel - I've only got four left to knit and then I'll be fancy free to do as I please.