My sister is working on her first sweater, Berkshire Pullover from Weekend Knitting. The sweater is knit in the round to the underarm, then worked back and forth to the shoulder. She has joined the shoulders together and now is at the stage where she needs to pick up to knit the sleeves and neck. After work today she and my mom are coming up so I can teach her how to do that. Natalie is knitting hers out of Paton's Shetland Chunky.

Right now I'm working on the raglan part of the second sleeve of my Cardamom cardigan. My second bag of yarn still hasn't arrived, but I'm continuing on. I just might have enough with one bag. I've got 10 hanks total; both sleeves together will use up 3 hanks and if I can finish the back piece in under 3.5, I'll have enough for the whole sweater. If worse comes to worst and I just can't get that second bag, I've decided that I'll just rip it all out and make an afghan for our living room instead.

I decided to be optimistic on the delivery of my second bag of Rowanspun. Saturday night I couldn't stand it anymore so I designed a simple raglan cardigan with some waist shaping based on my gauge swatch. The label on the Rowanspun suggests a gauge of 12 or 13 stitches to 4 inches with 6.5mm needles, which I decided was insanity. I used 5mm and after washing and blocking, my gauge turned out to be 14.5 stitches to 4 inches. That's 3.625 stitches to the inch. I calculated my pattern using 3.6.

The cardigan is going to be very plain. I haven't decided on a button band or a neck treatment yet. V-neck, crewneck, I don't know, but the ribbing I stole from Laughing Rat. I thought the simple, one-twist cable ribbing looked like little bows so I appropriated it at once.

I'm about a quarter of the way up the second sleeve. It's coming along very quickly; the larger gauge being fewer stitches around than Alex's Durrow. I have not forgotten Durrow, by the way. As soon as I finish the second sleeve on Cardamom (named for the colour of the yarn) I'm casting on for Durrow's second sleeve.

On January 15th Jeremy and I had a financial conference and it was decided that I should buy two bags of Rowanspun Chunky from Cucumberpatch for a pretty decent price. On January 17th I recieved information that my purchase had been shipped. On January 23 my package arrived. In fact, that's the yarn I photographed for my blog's title image, in the top left corner of the page (both photos are the same skein of yarn...what a difference lighting makes!). I was so amazed that my yarn showed up in 5 days FROM ENGLAND! But there was only one bag of yarn inside.

I emailed Cucumberpatch and asked them why that would be. I was really disappointed. They were very prompt and nice and explained that they have to send certain yarns in separate packages due to weight restrictions, and that in their experience the packages never seem to arrive on the same date even though they've been sent at the same time. That's perfectly fine, I understand that. It's unfortunate because in addition to tax and duty, there is a handling charge which I now have to pay twice. But it's not that much so it's not a big deal.

But today is the 27th and my second package still hasn't arrived. I'm getting nervous. First of all, I paid for two so I want two. Secondly, one bag isn't enough for a sweater to wrap around my giant breasts and I'm afraid if I get started, well...we won't even go there. But I love this yarn, this colour. I hug it and sniff it and I have wound a ball and made a swatch. But that's not enough! It's like when you're on the couch with your boyfriend and your parents come home early...stopping short SUCKS.

Anyway.

Can two packages mailed on the same day to the same address really show up a week apart? I'm going to give it to Tuesday, which will be two full weeks from the date they've been mailed, before I freak out.

Because I'm not freaking out right now.

I haven't made any new progress on Durrow, but here's a crappy picture of the sleeve cabling. I tried to get a wider shot of the sleeve so you could see the entire cable but I didn't have enough light.

So it's 4 in the morning and I just finished putting everything together in MT and I have a fully funtional blog again. I couldn't find a way to import from Wordpress so I guess I'm starting from scratch, but I'm going to keep everything up to this point as it is over here.