Ravelympics training

Yikes! Just 4 more days until the Ravelympics start! I've signed up with Team St Louis, for the Designers Discus event. Woohoo! The plan is to make a nice, normal, wearable sweater for my husband. His only request is that it be knitted from "small yarn, not like the sweaters at Target, but like a sweater from Brooks Brothers." A man's sweater from skinny yarn could potentially take forever, so after showing him what different weights looked like, we finally compromised on sport weight. I got some Louet Gems Sport in a dark blue at Knitty Couture. The color doesn't come through so well in my pictures, but it's a dark grayish-blue with a lovely sheen. I loved Louet Gems Worsted (yellow and orange), because it's such a smooth, non-itchy yarn, so I'm happy that I'll be working with the sport weight version.

I was so, so, very good and did a big swatch, in ribbing, and tried out the different possible cable patterns. I even blocked and pinned it!

I took all the necessary measurements, and now I'm figuring out how to make a plain, stylish sweater that is interesting to knit. Most of the men's patterns out there are too outdoorsy (fisherman/hunter-ish), too baggy, or just plain fugly. The newer patterns are better, but just a bit too cheeky (some might say geek-chic-y) and not appropriate for adults/employed people. So I'm hoping to design a fashionable, svelte sweater that a handsome, intelligent, grown-up, metrosexual man will want to wear! The sweater's name is thus the Urbane Sweater--urban, but the "e" makes it a bit smarter and more refined. It will have wide ribs so that it is fitted, but I'm going to throw a couple little cables in there, hee!

While the swatch dries, I'm keeping limber by knitting the Corinne Dress. After the blasted ruffle, the main part of the dress is going very fast. I'm up to the waist already! It really helps to be short.

The lace pattern is Parachute lace. It looks like little half-moons with cords hanging down, like parachutes, see?