702

I've been knitting, truly. But mostly on the striped sweater for Schaefer, which may never end. I've made all kinds of progress (and really, am almost done), but my goodness, there's a lot of fabric!

It's an XL men's sweater, and I mostly knit women's sweaters (and my last several have had 3/4 length sleeves), so it seems never-ending. The back, which I finished over the weekend and just took off my blocking cushion has a surface area of 702 square inches. That's nearly 5 square feet! And if the rule of thumb that the sleeves (finished!) together and a third of the total sweater and the front and back are each a third, that means the whole sweater will have a surface area of slightly more than 14.6 square feet.

Maybe this isn't the best way to think about this!

On the bright side, the yarn is lovely, and I can work the pattern without looking, so I can read or watch TV. Since there are 3 skeins of yarn, plus however much finished fabric to tote around, it's not the best project for break, but it's fine for knitting group (where people understand yarn containment). And when it's finished, I'll have only used 1,680 yards of yarn (or less--I think I'll have a bit of each color left over), which is less than 20th of how far I ran on Sunday.

See? Much better!

(Sorry for the picture-less-ness... this project and the other be-deadlined one are secret-ish, and the purple shawl is still an unphotogenic blob. But I'm making great progress--in 6 more rows I'll have a mere 354 stitches, a vast improvement over the original 620! Eventually, I'll be able to spread it out on the needle and attempt a photo session.

(Remind me that I have a story: I realized the shawl wasn't trying to kill me initially--I just had an unusually stupid knitting moment, which lasted for several days!)