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The pink cardigan is done (hooray!) and awaiting buttons. I will put off doing a final project evaluation until they have been found and fastened. I am intrigued by the technique Catherine Lowe uses to attach buttons: she doesn't. In the Spring/Summer Vogue Knitting this year there is a brief article on different closures, and Lowe describes making what are essentially cufflinks, with a fashion button for the outside and a smaller button that stays hidden. Definitely an interesting concept, although I'm not sure how well it will work for this particular garment.
I was definitely surprised by how pink this was once I put it on. Somehow the individual pieces didn't strike me with quite the same intensity while I was knitting. The first time I tried on the cardigan I wore a black shirt beneath it with a neutral skirt, but the difference was so stark that it seemed to highlight the color saturation. Instead of trying to "tone down" the pink with dark colors, I'm going to try wearing other colors that can compete. I don't know if that makes any sense from a color theory perspective, but it works for me.
On the tamer side of the color spectrum, my swatch is nearly done for Alouette. Using the stitch markers has been incredibly helpful, although I've still had to rip back quite a few times. I think I've reached a good stopping point, and now I have to decide exactly how to deal with the washing and pinning. I'm fairly certain that I will run out of this color when I'm actually knitting the sweater. I'm concerned that the process of knitting (and ripping and knitting again), washing, and pinning, only to rip out completely, might be too much stress for the yarn. I've noticed many places where the ply has begun to untwist, so I'm just not sure how well it will hold up. I considered buying a stray ball of Irish Cream from another dyelot. I've been trying to justify this by convincing myself that the stripes will be able to hide any color fluctuation, especially if I rotate the stray ball in randomly instead of saving it for one specific area. It would also be nice to have the swatch for keeps; I'm very close to starting a swatch binder. 
The most genius plan, of course, would have been waiting to begin the swatch until arriving back at school, since Webs has just started carrying 4 ply soft. Not in any of the colors I need, but since when does the swatch have to be the right color? I hope that this will be enough of a hassle that I start buying an extra ball for swatching, because that really seems like the most sensible thing to do.
There are some yarns you either love or hate. And I think I have just made a mistake, the kind of mistake you make when $40 more will get you free shipping so you order 6 balls of yarn without knowing if you're a lover or a hater. This is the pattern photo that did it:
I can't explain why I thought I would want to knit this twice. I would be very excited to wear this scarf, and I picked great colors for matching my coat, but the pattern itself seems very simple. I just started working on the first version this afternoon, and so far, I'm a hater. Now that I've had a chance to collect myself, I realize that a more appropriate needle would have made the whole experience a lot smoother. At first I tried some generic and pointy aluminum needles, but they were way too heavy, so I cast on again using Addis (the regular ones, not the lace version). I'll give you a peek at how things went:
This is what Mo would call "a hot mess". This particular disaster is because I jumped up to grab the phone, but the experience as a whole was fairly unpleasant. I think it's still early enough to manage without resorting to scissors even though I've heard this yarn is a terror to take out. I may leave this until I can get my hands on some nice, pointy lace needles.
To avoid dealing with the magenta business above, I decided to start my swatch for Alouette. Sometimes, it turns out, I'm a lover. A lover who wants to do the gauge swatch right. A lover who doesn't mind having to cast on again and again and again. A lover who is willing to go back and fix mistakes.
I love how the pattern is turning out. I can't wait to see how the colors play off each other in the stitch pattern, but I'm attracted to the simplicity of a single color; it seems luxurious in person. This swatch is much wider than any I've done before. I just listened to the swatching episode of the Knit Science podcast, and she recommends doubling the suggested width and measuring from the center to avoid any weird tension changes near the edges. For a while I toyed with the idea of going all out and making a complete sleeve as a gauge swatch, but I worried that doing all of the stripes would leave me with unusable scraps of yarn if I ended up having to make changes and start over. The swatch is so large that it's likely I'll need to unravel it in order to finish the actual sweater. I'm not sure what the implications are for how I wash and block it before measuring. It would have been a much more rational purchase to spend some of that $40 on an extra ball dedicated to swatching and a back-up ball of Calmer.
I spent all of yesterday sewing up the pink cardigan, but I'm holding out for some sunny weather before taking pictures. smbelcas warned me this morning that the Blue Sky Organic Cotton stretches out. I was using the Dyed Cotton and not the organic version, but they seem as if they would behave in an identical manner. I'm hoping that the eyelet pattern will be enough to hold the stitches in somehow. Does that seem reasonable? And if I keep it buttoned, mightn't the negative horizontal ease keep the stitches from collapsing?
