It is finished...

It's the last time you're going to have to hear about the sweater, at least until Fall...or maybe the dead of winter, when I can wear it again.  I started it on January 1, and I finished knitting on Saturday and had all the loose ends tucked in yesterday morning.  I put it on and got Rob to take some pics.  

I decided against the shawl collar.  I was half done with it when I realized I've never had a shawl collar sweater before and wasn't sure I was going to like it.  Then, I thought about how rough this wool yarn is and how that was going to be up around my neck and face and I had visions of Leonard Hofstadter in the sweater of punishment that Sheldon made him wear and pulled it out and started over again.  I like this collar better.  

And, the back.  I love how the back looks.  It's my favorite part of the sweater.  

 All that's left is buttons.  I have an extensive button collection and was sure I'd find something there.  But, everything was either too bright or it would have been 4 + 1 that was a close match.  I had about 5 sets that I could have used but none of them was "the" set, so I headed to Amazon and found a couple that I think would work very well and they should be here tomorrow.  Most sellers on Amazon wanted to sell me 50-100 identical buttons and I only need 5.  Part of the search became finding sellers that would sell me a reasonable number that didn't become a burdensome bag of buttons hanging out in my studio closet until Syd inherited them.  I decided 10 was all I would buy and I found a set of 10 and a set of 6.  

True confession...when I pulled it off the needles, my sweater did not fit.  It was very big.  It hung low on me and bunched up in the shoulders.  

The back looked fine, but the front was kind of a mess.  

So, I took my 6 1/2 months of work and put it in the dryer. It's not the first time I've sized a wool sweater this way.  And, it is not for the faint of heart.  I studied before I did it and learned that it's the banging around in the dryer that causes wool to felt.  While I knew they pounded wool in the past to felt it, it never occurred to me that's what causes wool to felt in a dryer.  I sprayed the sweater with a mister bottle until it was damp and put 4 large fluffy bath towels in the dryer first and got them hot, then I arranged them so the sweater was in the middle and I turned it on.  Making sure the sweater was in the middle was a waste of time because every time I opened the dryer, it was not in the middle, but it did keep the sweater from felting.  I set a timer for 4 minutes and started out only being able to let it go for 2 the first round, but after that, I played solitaire on my phone to keep me busy and was able to let the dryer work it's magic.  The first few times I pulled it out, you couldn't see the difference, but then the sweater began to look smaller, so I started pulling it out and putting it on every couple cycles.  I even decided to dampen it again at one point and that really sped things up.  And, the last time I put it on, I knew it was right.  My little balls of yarn were all grown up into something I love (or will love when the weather gets cooler) and am very proud of.  I can't wait to show it off.  

This is what's left of the poor pattern.  Six and a half months of being used almost every day has worn it out.  Spilling water on it didn't help.  I'll lay it flat and staple it together and put it with my other patterns as a reminder of that year I made this really crazy sweater that took forever!  I filled those two pages of notebook paper up with handwritten notes, especially after I decided to go "off pattern".

Last week, my new manager asked me to do something that shouldn't have been done, but he's new and inexperienced and didn't know it shouldn't have been done.  The first day, I did it like he said to do it.  It was a diz-ass-tah.  The second day, I logged in early and wrote the plan I'd made the night before in an email to him.  I even said that what I'd been doing wasn't working, but it allowed me to learn about the topic and make a new plan.  Long after my work day was over on Friday, he and I continued to chat and I think I was a little surprised at how grateful he was that I'd taken an idea that no one had done before and created a plan and made it work.  But, hopefully, he won't ask me to do that again.  

Everybody be well.  This week's themes are "Never give up!  Never surrender!" and "If you can't love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?"  Now, I'm going to go practice those.  

Lane