Popping back in

For being one who loves to knit, I have been terribly negligent of my craft throughout this past winter and even now into the spring.  Additionally, you can see my negligence in my writing as well:  an observation of the time lapse between my last post in January to today's (which I had to talk myself into writing) is a fair judgement of this negligence.

To my faithful readers, I apologize!  Here I am--I've popped back in to say, "Hello!  Look, I made another sweater!"

Because, look!  I've made another sweater!

The pattern is the Plowman Cardigan by Alex Capshaw-Taylor, published in the Interweave Knits magazine.  By the pattern, it is to be constructed in its separate pieces (right-front, left-front, back, sleeves) and then sewn together.  Additionally, there are supposed to be color designs on both the front and the back of the sweater.

But I did not knit the pattern without modifications, of course!  Hating to sew in sleeves, I opted to pick up the sleeves from around the armholes and then knit down toward the wrist; I'm glad I did, because it turned out very well.  And since I was running out of blue yarn, I opted to knit the front pieces of the sweater in only one color, adding just enough texture to make it interesting.

Construction and mods aside, the main reason I wanted to tackle this sweater was for the intarsia, or the color design, on the back.  Not only is it fascinating and unique and cool-looking, I had never truly attempted intarsia prior to this project and had a great desire to learn it.

My conclusion:  to say the least, intarsia is crazy.  I can't imagine trying intarsia for anything other than blocks of color.  I can't even imagine trying intarsia with more than two colors!  I laughed myself silly at one point, when I discovered I had ELEVEN different strings of yarn for one row.  ELEVEN different strings which WOULD get entangled no matter how hard I tried to keep them in order.

ELEVEN different strings.  It is ridiculous--there are only two colors.

But I will admit, it does look pretty cool on the inside:

And so ends another sweater.  For a brief review of the pattern and a few other mods, you can check out my project on Ravelry under The Long Road.  I will leave you with a few more pictures of it, perhaps with the most accurate representation of the color.  I have to say, it is hard to tell even in person whether the color is more red or more orange..."adobe" is the best way I can describe it!