LK Knits

OK, I must really like this yarn and pattern to dive in this quickly:

That is the body and most of the first sleeve of the lopi sweater using the yarn and pattern I bought in Iceland. And I've only been home a week!

This progress is due to two things: I was a bachelorette during the week last week, so I spent more evening time by myself watching movies than usual. But more significantly, and less healthily, I absolutely use knitting as workcrastination. The bigger the task, the more I workcrastinate; thus having a book manuscript deadline of August 31 means I have knit a LOT since January! This is why I loaned my copy of Melissa Leapman's Cables Untangled to a girlfriend back in February: no cables for me until I finish the book! But then this lopi thing happened ...

I'm just whining a little to get it off my chest and alleviate the guilt. The writing will get done; indeed, it was mostly done even before I "officially" started writing in January. But it's the knitting it all together (pun intended) that is the hard, and intellectually rewarding, stage I'm at now.

But the knitting gratification comes more quickly ...

Mid-July saw a knitting hiatus on the lopi sweater because it was just too dang humid, but about a week and a half ago I finished it:

And a closeup of the yoke:

I loved working on this sweater; two-color stranding is fun, the yarn is wonderfully woolly and lofty, and the yoke decrease technique is particularly gratifying. The other detail of this pattern that I particularly like is the picot edge on the neckband. I have a tendency to bind off too tightly on neck edges, so the picot edge mitigates some of that.

I still have to weave in all of those ends ... but it's about 85 degrees here, so there's no rush, because I won't be able to wear it for a couple of months!

And I have lots of yarn left over for mittens and hats!