Irish Moss 1

The maple man is getting a sweater. Knit by me.

Now, he's a big guy, about 6'4", with long arms so this is a major knitting committment. He has hand-knit socks but no sweater knit by me. He is a patient husband who knows how much knitting means to me. He handles his share of the housework and cooking and shopping, or more, so as not to cut into the knitting time (or blogging time ). He never complains about how much I spend on yarn, though I am reasonable (at least in my opinion), or books, or needles or etc. He likes "eating out" (what we call eating in the den) which is good because of the various projects and yarn and fiber etc that generally covers the table. Or should I say tables. Don't ask.

I've been looking at patterns and giving him choices, and he settled on Irish Moss from Starmore's aran book. My local library has it and it is surprisingly generally available. And I have a couple of Sisters (of the Wool) who have it, if I should use up my check-out-limit.

The Silky Wool from last week's lys yarn sale is the chosen yarn. Light enough for general winter wear in Texas. Wooly enough for pleasant knitting. Based on my swatching, I had to drop down to a size 5 needle to get a nice sweater fabric that hopefully won't get the droops (that's a technical term that some of you may know).

However, the pattern specifies gauge in moss stitch, which is fine, but moss stitch is just the underarm filler. But what about all those cables?? So after working out my gauge, and swimming my swatches, being unable to do adjusting calculations without a major swatch-fest of every cable included, I threw caution to the wind and cast on for a sleeve. Sisters, pick yourselves up off of the floor.

Then I tried the first cuff on him, frogged it and cast on for a bigger cuff.
[Just for the record, and for the second sleeve cuff, the cuff is knit on size 3's.]

Without further ado, here are the first pictures of Irish Moss:



and up close:



Now I do hope this blog does not become too boring. I plan to focus a lot of knitting time on this sweater. I plan to knit at least one ball per week, which is 175 meters. This also gets the sweater done in time for his birthday in November. And in time for winter. If we have winter. There are lots of cables to knit with associated chart-paying-attention. As far as blogging, I will post a progress pic at least once per week with perhaps more frequent gram reports.