I finished a major project today, the birthday present I’ve been working on for the last couple of weeks.  It’s always a bit strange to knit the last stitch of a sweater that has been my companion for weeks or months.  It’s a victory of sorts to knit a sweater, to see it through to the end through all those thousands of stitches.  Most of the projects I’ve made, including this one, were by and large a pleasure to make.  I have done a few that were really difficult to motivate myself to finish, however – most notably a cardigan knit on size 1 and 3 needles and featuring a steek (where you slice up the middle of a piece of knitted fabric – terrifying!), seamless set-in sleeves, and a great deal of stranded colorwork, as well as a lot of my least favorite thing to do in knitting, picking up and knitting stitches from a finished edge.  Anyway, I was incredibly relieved to be done with that one after working on it obsessively for about two months.  And I’m happy to be done with this project too, though I mostly enjoyed making it, because I’m already past the deadline of the recipient’s birthday. All that's left now is to wait for it to dry out after the washing and blocking I gave it a little while ago.

As always when I finish something there’s a sense of “what now?”  It’s like when you’ve been reading a long, engrossing book and you finally get to the end.  Do you just put it away and pick up another one?  It’s a bit weird, like watching two completely different movies back to back.  At any rate, I am torn about what to make next.  Now that I’ve finished this garment I have four works in progress on the needles – a nearly finished short sleeved fair-isle sweater, a stockinette cardigan that I’ve been picking at here and there for months that’s maybe 40 percent finished, one half of one sleeve of a laceweight shrug, and 30 percent or so of a bulky weight hat.  A lot of knitters don’t mind having tons of works in progress at any one time, but I’m about at my limit, so I have to finish at least one of these things before I can start the Aurora sweater I blogged about last week.  It’ll probably be the fair isle sweater, since it’s about 90 percent complete already, and could most likely be finished in ten hours or so of knitting.

Anyway, be on the lookout over the next few days for the first of my Finished Object posts, in which I will ramble on ad nauseum about the process of making a particular item.  As a reward to my readers for slogging through the knitting terminology, though, these posts will include pretty pictures! Stay tuned!