New Year, New Big Project!

Cascade 220 Superwash Paints in Vino

So I've been wanted to try making another sweater for a while now.  I thought about spinning up my own yarn for it, but I don't think I quite have the chops to pull it off.  So I hemmed and hawed, looked at bazillions of patterns, and finally after receiving a lovely Christmas present of a boatload of yarn is a fabulous color, I made a decision!  I am making the Brattleboro Cabled Swing Pullover by Valley Yarns which is a semi-local (2 hour drive away) yarn company.  

I am very excited about this sweater for a bunch of reasons:  

1. It will be a challenge.  This things is covered in cables.  A friend of mine made a gorgeous cabled sweater this past year and it placed at The Big E's Creative Arts competition.  I haven't done a ton of cable work before so I need to practice.
2. The sweater looks phenomenal.   I love my first sweater but it is definitely of a first ever knitted sweater variety.  I was something more elegant, that I could actually wear out to a nice dinner somewhere.  Also, I want someone to mistake something I hand knit for a store bough product.  That's the best compliment ever!
3. The fit.  This sweater is basically a-line and has a scoop neck, both of which looks great on me.  I am of a body type that can be challenging, so to find something that should really work and be flattering at the same time is really important. If you didn't look at the link to the pattern above, look now.  They have a great picture that you can enlarge to see more of the detail.

The first three repeats...

So, I started working on the first part of the sweater a couple days ago. I have only finished three repeats of the first chart (out of 38, sigh), but I am loving how it is coming out.  As you can see, I'm making a narrow strip, and yes that does seem an odd way to start a sweater.  The pattern begins by having you knit the yoke band which runs around the entire circumference of the piece at the shoulders.  After doing that you pick up stitches from the top and bottom of the cabled yoke to knit the rest of the sweater.  That way you can have cables going perpendicularly to each other.  It's pretty neat actually.

So, that is my exciting new project for the new year.  I have no idea how long it is going to take me to finish, but I'm thinking I'll give myself a couple months as a goal to be realistic.  Well, I at least have to start doing more than one repeat a day or it's going to take me 38 days just to finish this little section, which probably is only 10% of the whole project!

Anyway, wish me luck!  I'll keep you up to date ;-)