Beading Hiatus

This is it for beading for the next eight days, because I'm leaving for SOAR in fewer hours than how much sleep I need.

Each separate part of the pendant on this necklace took longer t0 make than the entire necklace, what with all the cutting up. I enjoy cutting up peyote (but not diagonal peyote), as you can just neatly slide the thread out of the beads, but in general, too much of a good thing isn't, and this just had to be something complete.

Fun little earrings. If I had time, I might make more.

Back in the golden days when I was unemployed (the first three and a half months of last year, good times) I spun a medium fleece which had been carded with grey kid mohair and a touch of blue silk into a worsted (light worsted, probably) weight three-ply yarn, intending it for a jacket.

After some months (about a year ago), I dyed it a lovely burnt-orangey-rust, carefully ensuring that one end of each hank was a little lighter than the other end. I wanted the striations of kettle-dyed yarn with consistency across skeins, and I think I achieved it.

I found a collection of cable panels worked over twenty-four stitches (and adjusted a few to fit the same count), and started knitting an a-line cabled jacket. First I made the sleeves, sorta kinda thinking they might be a little narrow, but ignored my misgivings, putting them aside so that I could work on the body.

I decided that the cable on each sleeve would extend into saddle shoulders, and fixed on an uneven collar (see Norah Gaughan's Ram's Horn Cardigan in her book, Knitting Nature for an approximation of the shape I want), and when the time came to join the saddles to the shoulders I had to admit that yes, truly, the sleeves were too narrow.

Then there was Bead Fest Santa Fe, and I needed a knitting project that (a) didn't weigh multiple pounds (this is a mid-thigh length a-line jacket with cables, using a fairly dense yarn) and (b) wasn't at a stuck point and (c) offered many hours of knitting pleasure without a looming stuck point, so I started on something else.

Then it was spring and so I had to start knitting in cotton. Summer followed (as it invariably does in my experience), and when it had run its course, fall was in the air (predictably, no?), but I still had one more cotton/rayon summery top to finish.

SOAR loomed on the horizon and all I could find for the gallery was the merino-tencel sweater I was knitting (and undoing and reknitting ad nauseum) last SOAR, the sweater started in Santa Fe (the sleeves of which might also be on the narrow side but I'm pretending I didn't say that) and a partially finished a-line jacket with too-narrow sleeves.

Something had to be done.

I ripped out the sleeves, and reknitted them, one at a time, trying them on to be sure.

I finished the second sleeve this afternoon.

Both sleeves have been sewn in.

There is no collar. I have live neck stitches on a circular needle, a crochet hook (the weight of the jacket demands that the neckline be stabilized), and quite a few travel hours ahead of me. This is not an impossible task, unless I have to sleep on the plane, which is not unlikely but which throws the proverbial wrench in my knitting plans.

Nonetheless.

There is the possibility (dare I say likelihood) that I will have an orangey-rust a-line cabled jacket ready for the SOAR gallery, WITHOUT BUTTONS.

That will not do.