Oooh Pretty!

One side of the Jan sweater is complete:



While I recognize the gratuitousness of 3 shots to show the same thing, cut me some slack, cuz man, this has been a labour of love. An insanely frustrating, almost-crushing-at-times, labour of love. Seriously, peeps, I'm amazed the yarn could manage as many rip backs and re-knits as I put it through.

I have learned so many things in this process so far:

• How to rib (on mega tiny needles)
• How to yarn over and then knit 2 together
• Lacework repeats
• Decreasing stitches "in pattern"
• Binding off in rib

Perhaps the best lesson of all happened earlier this week when I worked with an expert at my LYS who explained to me exactly how I was going to have to intuit the lace work as I decreased "in pattern". As you can imagine, once one starts removing stitches, slavish devotion to the pattern and the math involved re: number of repeats no longer applies. You can only imagine how freaked I was when I figured out my math was useless - that I would have to understand what to do next by considering what had come before. (People, who says things unironically like, "I freaked out to learn the math was useless"?!?!?)

I don't mean to overstate the case, but this has been practically life changing. It means I won't need to check off every single stitch on every lace work row when I do the next side. I'll be able to observe if what I've done is correct because now I see how the individual stitches impact the look of the garment. It's not some great mystery anymore. Well, it's vaguely less of a mystery.