#WIPWednesday: and then We Came to the End

Last week, your intrepid correspondent was deep (so deep) in the weeds of what has become an annual February Festival of Sweater Finishing. There was a lot of coffee, a lot of yarn being driven back and forth across the mid-Peninsula in the middle of the night, many episodes of Binge Mode, and three sets of hands involved (which is a funny story about gauge for another day), but by the end of yesterday, what had been several piles of unseamed pieces and unfinished cardigan fronts and omg-how-much-longer-does-this-cowlneck-need-to-be had transformed into two finished and photographed sweaters. It was not always pretty (ask my husband about the number of nights I feel asleep on the couch while knitting), but, they’re here and they’re sweaters and I am pretty freaking ecstatic about them. And even though the sausage sometimes got made in mildly bonkers ways, three finished sweaters and sweater patterns (and a hat!) before the end of February feels like not a bad start to 2019.

I took a break from SweaterFest 2019 to teach on Friday night at our local yarn shop, Uncommon Threads in Los Altos. I taught one of my favorite classes, “Speed Dating Your Yarn.” The class pulls together a lot of my thoughts about characteristics of yarn and why they matter for knitting, how to pair yarn and projects, and how to find out as much as you can about the relevant aspects of a new-to-you yarn and what you might do with it quickly.

Now I’m in the less-glamorous but critical back end of the process, finalizing the patterns, fixing charts, typesetting, etc., while getting logistically ready for Stitches West itself. I spent most of this morning going through the photos from both sweaters (with huge thanks to Michelle for being once again an incredibly patient model, and her son Everest for being earth’s most self-sufficient six-year-old). My desk is covered with printouts and red pens, and I’ve swapped the constant hum of my favorite podcast for my favorite editing music (the Goldberg variations, with a hat tip to Ian McEwan). If I actually showed you a picture of my current work-in-progress at the moment, it would be a picture of the Adobe InDesign window open on my desktop.

There’s a strange and kind of glorious zen to this part of the work, which provides a welcome break for my wrists and engages parts of my brain that don’t get used as much when I’m frantically trying to get through the actual knitting of the things. It draws on my lawyer’s precision and desperate fear of typos, and my inner graphic designer’s passion for typographical details and occasional inadvertent fanaticism about line weights. It’s the end of the path from concept to instrument of service, from my brain to your hands. Less instagrammable, but no less important or, to me, less fun.

What are you working on this week? Will I see you at Stitches West this weekend?

*Summit, in Green Mountain Spinnery’s Alpaca Elegance*