Eye-less owls

Here's a quick shot of an almost-completed Owls, taken pre-blocking and looking a little stiff. It relaxed a fair bit after it was washed. I don't think the fit really changed, but the hand definitely did, becoming a bit drapier and softer. And I blocked the neck a bit lower in front. The yarn, Louet Riverstone Bulky, is one I'd definitely use again, especially because it's really inexpensive for good, basic wool in great colors. It's spun and plied pretty softly, so I wouldn't use this yarn for serious cables, but it was perfect for this: soft enough to wear next to the skin, strong enough for a workhorse sweater. I had to break into the fifth skein to finish this sweater, but not by much. So that's less than $25 for a sweater's worth of yarn. I'm actually looking over my queue today to see what else it would work for. (Thinking about this, with a more elegant edge treatment and some waist shaping. Maybe in strawberry, which seems like a good, cheerful spring color. And that navy is a particularly good one, should maybe squirrel a bit of that away as well.)

A caveat: I found the recommended #10 needles to be much too big for the yarn and used #9s. This was a little annoying, since I'd bought the yarn specifically for the sweater, but not impossible to work around. I followed the numbers for the largest size in order to end up with a 34" bust and increased the number of rows by about 20% (so, anytime the directions said to increase every 4th row, I'd increase every 5th).

After I was a ways into it, I started wishing I had turned it into a cardigan, but I hadn't included any steek stitches, and didn't really have room to do much about it without slicing into some of the owls. I figured it wouldn't hurt to do a little sampling and see if I could make something work, so last night I worked up a little swatch and cut it without stabilizing to see if picking up stitches immediately would be enough to keep it from falling apart. It wasn't. And I don't feel strongly enough about it to look into any more labor-intensive options. So it'll stay a pullover, which is totally fine.

This weekend, sewing on all those buttons and taking some more photos...