Distracted.

I've been a mite distracted, though have been making slow, steady process on Venezia - and she is looking lovely! It seems I am going to have to either learn how to machine reinforce my steeks or opt for hand stitching them...neither option is particularly appealing, but I figure I should be able to figure it out - how hard could it possibly be? ;) Unfortunately, even though I have been knitting for 4 years or more, I haven't a single "old swatch" laying around anywhere to test feed to yon monster the lovely sewing machine - looks like I might be spending some idle time with some scrap yarn to make swatches to see if the machine likes to eat handknits. Some kind folk on the Stranded board at Ravelry have suggested using tear away stabilizer to protect the knitted fabric from undue tasting on behalf of the machine - we'll see how it does with the appetizers sample swatches. Worst case, I resort to hand stitching the reinforcements - it can't be that bad - tedious, yes, but doable - after all, I never thought I'd handstitch in a zipper into a sweater, and yet I did that just this past winter!

In other mad adventures, it seems I've decided I like knitting fine gauge sweaters - I'm planning on joining some knitting friends on a Elizabeth Zimmermann Saddle Shoulder sweater knit along. I'll show you the yarn soon - I really need to swatch - the others are way way way ahead of me (as in approximately 1/2 sweaters worth of knitting done already!)