A second red sweater complete

When I was a kid, my dad used to sit and colour in our colouring books with us.  If there happened to be a little girl in a dress on his page, he always coloured the dress red and made the collar white.  He said red dresses were swell.

I must have been affected by this, because I still think red is swell and it seems I find knitting red sweaters swell too.

REd Sweater No. 2, Cloud Cotton from Estelle Designs, knit following the instructions for a top down raglan in Knitting from the Top.

All buttoned up  

and how I will probably wear it.  In the end, the sleeves are a little large.  I may still redo the lace on smaller needles to lessen the effect because it is only at the end of the sleeves that they seem large. They fit nicely through the cap.   

The other interesting thing I learned is if you want a wider neckline, you are going to have to start with a lot more stitches than this.  This fits quite beautifully at my neck as you can see but isn't the wide low neckline it seemed to be when I was first knitting it.  I was worried that it would be too low!  Silly me.

It may have been a season of sweaters for me, but there is something I get from the sweaters that I don't get from some of the other things I knit.  The sense of accomplishment is really very different, fuller, deeper, richer.  It is a little addictive.  It surely is beyond satisfying.

It has also been a season of red.  It is time to knit another colour, methinks.  Blue perhaps.  Nice gray green?  Black and turquoise accents?  Soft grape?  Warm purple?

I think that is where I am off to today.  Finishing a purple thing.  The purple sweater is ripe for sleeves, and I finally understand what I need to do to get the right fit with them.    It would be nice to start with a different colour and go in a completely different direction, but there is a lot to be said for getting the WIP basket by my chair emptied.

But you never know. Swatching is always an excuse. I might sneak in time to play with some blue yarn too.