This weekend, amidst a three-person band, a teething infant, planting bulbs, cleaning in the garden, chasing turkeys, feeding them all (the turkeys and the band), and ignoring a whole lot of laundry...a sweater was finished! Hooray!
There's that funny thing that happens when I sit down, as documented in the first photograph above (with two big boys just out of the frame - one with a book in his nose, the other with a slingshot in his hand). I'm sure it happens to Mama's (and Papa's too!) all the world over, all throughout time. I sit down. They cluster around. It's all good, and funny, and quite how I've grown accustomed to getting anything done. These days, I barely notice the juggle that's required to do that knitting. It involves giving Adelaide and Harper my knitting 'accessories' bag to dump out and play with (which might be why I found my tape measure by the woodshed on Sunday), talking to Calvin about why the slingshot can't be used in the house (felt balls or not!), discussing with Ezra the finer points of Harry Potter book six (despite not having read any but the first one myself), nursing a baby every other row, all while keeping track of where I am on that pattern, anyway.
It might seem crazy to sit down in the middle of all of that and knit. Surely, I love knitting in silence, and know that there will be evenings and years ahead in which to do so. But for right now, this middle-of-it-all knitting is what I've got, and I rather like it. Sitting cross legged on the floor in the middle of it all and picking up the needles - it sets a tone - the rhythm, if you will - to this wild and raucous seven-person band I'm in.
{Ravelry Notes here.}
The sweater is Annabel (the sweater, not the baby). The pattern is by the lovely Carrie Bostick Hoge, with yarn by Quince & Co., Osprey weight, in the colorway of honey, to be exact (yum). The buttons are, once again, from Mystic Orb. I adore them. (And while we're talking about what I'm wearing in this post, I have to mention the comfiest gauchos ever.)
It's such a sweet and simple cardigan pattern, and with that super thick yarn, it almost felt like cheating how fast it worked up. I was thinking it would make a really great 'first knitted sweater' sweater, actually. Either that, or a really great "knit in the middle of a whole lot of really wonderful family life chaos" sweater.
Yup. It was perfect for that kind of knitting too...
