Arwen Apace

The top-down Arwen is making good progress. I think that I am about an inch away from the waist shaping. It was exceedingly helpful to be able to try the sweater on my sister as I knit the raglan increases, to ensure a perfect fit. It also fits me rather nicely.

The hood is beautiful, I think:

It's not really lopsided; that's just the way it's hanging on my shoulders. But in order to make it hang properly and to give it some extra support, I think I am going to knit in a strip of i-cord across the back of the neck, a la Elizabeth Zimmermann.

Knitting this sweater has made me love my Knitpicks options needles even more than before. In the picture above it is clear that I have used two 24-inch cables to hold the arm stitches, meaning that the stitches were easy to slip to the holder (I just purled the sleeves with separate needles on the previous row and then took off the needles and put on the plugs), and that when I get around to picking up the sleeve stitches, all I'll need to do is put needle tips back on them.

Houston, we have a hood.

The top-down Arwen is going much more smoothly. Four balls of yarn later, I have a complete hood and about half of the raglan increases. The cable pattern seemed difficult to begin with, but I've got it memorized now (after all, there are only four cabled rows in the whole chart). With luck, I'll have this sweater finished by the time my sister moves into her new apartment -- that's right, her wool sweater will be finished just in time for hot Boston summer...

Froggy Jamboree

After weeks of knitting on my Arwen, I realized that it was just too big. So this:


became this:

Ensuring a proper fit seemed to necessitate knitting the sweater from the top down, but I wasn't sure how to make the hood work out from the top down. And then I hit on the perfect solution: the figure-8 cast-on for toe-up socks. And, aside from a few twisted stitches, I think that it worked out really well. Here's the hood progress so far:
I'm on the decrease section of the hood now, and when it reaches the right length and circumference for the collar, I'll just start the raglan increases for the top-down sweater.