Arwen Update

While my life has been more than a little crazy for the past few months, and honestly, I’ve not tried to do too much to stop the crazy (witness our impromptu road trip to Stitches Midwest a couple of weeks ago), I have still managed to knit quite a bit on my Cardigan for Arwen.
While driving to Chicago, I decided to forego knitting the cables and concentrate on the plain square stockinette back. It felt like I was knitting forever, and when we got back, I still hadn’t finished it. That piece became my airplane knitting on the way to San Antonio last Friday. I pretty much finished it on the flight, see?

Since Arwen was the only knitting I brought along on that trip (yes, it was a mistake, I know, but I was trying to pack light), I was forced to work on the left front with the cable on both the band and the cuff. I plodded away, and even managed to work on it in the car on our drive to Padre Island. It’s amazing how much knitting you can get done on a 5-hour total drive, because I finished the sleeve portion on Sunday after we got back.

Since that part was done, I measured the back piece against the front and realized I needed about another 1 1/2″ and cranked it out as well, leaving only the hood to be done for that piece. I spent some time poking around Ravelry trying to figure out if I should knit the hood in one piece after the right front was done, which was my preference, but that meant starting the right front next. Which would have been fine if I’d brought my smaller sized needles with me for the cast on. Since there was no 24-hour yarn store nearby, I decided to suck it up and knit the pattern as written. Thus, the hood commenced.
I couldn’t knit in my meetings, so I was limited to Monday night in the hotel room and Tuesday on the plane. I worked on it a bit on the flight to Dallas, but then had to stop. Why? Because I left my pattern in the pocket of the airplane seat in front of me. My apologies to Kate Gilbert, because I inadvertently provided someone a free copy of her pattern, complete with all my notes, modifications, and highlighted cable charts. Grrrr.
I thought by that point I’d memorized the chart, but I messed up the next row and decided to just stop knitting until I could retrieve a copy of the pattern. I knew I should have brought Shawl that Jazz with me.