Swatch? Wool? What?

The weather has been fabulous lately and everyone is breaking out their summer wardrobe, but last night I developed an acute, inexplicable, and inescapable urge to swatch something in WORSTED-WEIGHT WOOL. And then it happened again this evening! Maybe it was an overdose of TV addling my brain.... At this point there's probably not much I can do except show the results.

This is the Takhi Donegal Tweed that I bought at WEBS during their tent sale. I had originally wanted to use it for the Cabled Riding Jacket from Teva Durham's book Loop-d-Loop, but I really like how stockinette stitch looks in this yarn and it's tempting to avoid the cables and just do a plain stockinette sweater.

The concept of swatching is still foreign to me; I rarely do it and tend to ignore the results anyway (which may explain why the sweater I made last Christmas for my husband is so baggy that he would be arrested for indecent exposure if he wore it in public without a shirt underneath). These swatches matched the gauge pattern before washing and blocking, but once blocked the stockinette swatch lengthened a bit. I'll have to see how it looks when dry.

Claude the cow-cat planted himself on my lap (as usual) while I knitted. This is truly a creature I will never understand--although he gets upset when touched anywhere besides his head and shoulders, he insists on lying in the one spot where he is guaranteed to get yarn wrapped around his tail. The more yarn there is, the angrier he gets, and the angrier he is, the more violently his tail waves and the more it snares the yarn. Fortunately this episode ended with less bloodshed than usual.



Bagpipe practices heard in the last week: 1
Neighbourhood beer pong games in the last week: 1
Arguments with spouse over whether "snare" can be used as a verb: 1
Neighbourhood arrests in the last week: 1
Correlation: hopefully none