New Car, Sweaters, KAL and Sock Yarn...

I know I've been gone from this little corner of blogland for a while.  I've been struggling a lot with some personal and medical issues (nothing serious or life threatening, but a pain nevertheless) so my desire to blog and create has been on the back burner.  Don't get me wrong, I've been making stuff just not as quickly as I usually do ;)  Also, summer is here and well I think it's going to take me the full three months to get into the summer schedule...right about the time I have to get used the new school schedule :)  


There reason for mini-vacation from blogging explained.  Now onto what you're all here for The 2012 Summer Sweater Knit-A-Long hosted by the Fantabulos Shannon of luvinthemommyhood!  I'm excited to join in again this summer.  Do you remember my sweater from last year?  

Pumpkinlicious Cardi
Pattern Reversible Come and Go Sweater by Deborah Newton 

Oh. My. Goodness.  I just discovered that I never posted the finished picture!  Ack!  Well that's okay, I'm planning on tearing apart the fronts and turning the cardigan into a pullover.  I'll show before and after pics when I work on it, you forgive me now I know :)

I have decided to knit myself a pullover.  I really wanted to knit something seamless, preferably a top down (I love top downs).  I fell head-over-heels in love with Umbrellas by Joji Locatelli this spring.

lilalu's umbrellas

 As soon as I heard there was to be another summer sweater KAL I knew I wanted to knit this pattern.  However, I wanted to buy yarn to knit it and was fully intending to do so but then our car died, it wasn't worth fixing and so we took the plunge and bought a new car.  Husband loves it and it is a wonderful car, gets excellent MPGs and came in the perfect color for Husband (it's his commuter car) but it came with a car payment YUCK!  So in a moment of rare responsibility I put off buying yarn for this sweater mostly because I wanted to knit with something new and fresh - when you read the words new and fresh it does the same thing vintage does to the price tag at the thrift store...it goes up.

So I tucked the pattern away in my mind, life moved on and so did my knitting and crafting, well sort of, and I started to look to my stash and see what I had and if there was a pattern in my collection of patterns that would work with yarn that I already have.  Guess what?  I have a lot of sock yarn...no socks...but lots of yarn.  Different colors but most are in the same color family.  Umbrellas is knit with sock yarn, could I make it work with my modge podge of sock yarn?

no, this isn't all the sock yarn I have but these are the yarns I'm going to use

Yesterday I looked through it all and concluded that yes I could but that it would look even better if I were able to find a couple more skeins of a sock yarn that I had the most of.  A quick search on ravelry a few messages back and forth and winner winner chicken dinner I'm getting more yarn at a very reasonable price.  I bought the pattern this morning and while I can't cast on until I finish another project I am very happy.

The color I'm getting more of :)

Stay tuned to see how it turns out.  I'm going to be eternally optimistic about it and see it turning out incredibly well :)  Now to finish my project and get started on this one...it'll take me all summer!