What season's next? Sweater Season!

The stores may be gearing up for back to school, but I'm gearing up for sweater season and I'm getting excited!

This week, I completely finished Jim's sweater, the one with the puffed sleeves, but I haven't taken any pictures yet as its hot outside today. I'm still not thrilled with the shoulder caps, but it will do.

Also this week, I finished the knitting on my Folklore sweater, but it is far from done. Today, I've been working on hand sewing the steeks.  Here's a steek peek, from the wrong side:

I'm catching every strand through the middle with my needle and thread.  This is a super wash yarn and I want to secure it as best I can. Here's what it looks like on the right side:

Can hardly see it, eh?  Still, this faint thread will be turned under to the back.

After I sew it, I'll cut it. Then I'll prepare my zipper according to this fabulous technique developed by TechKnitter and explained here by Eunny Jang:



After that, it's just a matter of knitting the zipper to the sweater with some i-cord, then capturing the cut ends of the sweater beneath the zipper tape with another row of handstitching, this time in a non-contrasting thread. Piece of cake, right?  No, I'll confess, I'm quailing at the thought of the amount of work left to do on this sweater. I even want to reknit the cuffs still.

It's just under a month till the KW Knitter's Fair and I'm hoping to be wearing it there. Will I make it?  I know you're just on the edge of your seats.

All this and I'm suffering under the handicap of being distracted by other projects I want to start. At first I thought I wanted to make Twist and Shout, then the Twist Collective Fall 2011 was released and I thought I wanted to make Eadon. For a long time I waffled between these two projects and then I saw a Drops sweater that trumped them both, except I want to make it a pullover, from the top down. 

Don't you love sweater season?