The left front of the Sunrise Circle Jacket is nearly finished.  I think there are maybe 20 rows left.  Of course, they’re the longest rows and I’m bored with it.  I’m also tired of all the lint coming off the yarn.

I’m kind of in a knitting rut.  My latest socks aren’t capturing my interest either.

Over Labor Day weekend we went to Missoula to see the sights. Saturday afternoon we found this interesting sight – plane on a train:

The next day we drove around town and we went to the new Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation headquarters.

The new building is much nicer than the old one (although I have to say the old location led me to Quality Supply, one of my favorite stores in Montana). Anyway, the exhibits seemed to be essentially the same, just in a nicer exhibit space. 

We spent a lot of time driving around, checking out the scenery and smelling the trees. It reminds me of eastern Washington. This must have been outside of town – around Missoula it was quite smoky from the wildfires in Idaho.

Do you want to see what I have been working on? This is the bag of knitting I took with me this weekend:

This is the Sunrise Circle Jacket available free from Interweave Knits. I started it August 24th. I was even a good knitter and I knit a gauge swatch for the first time ever.

The pattern has been out for a while so I searched the Internet to see what successes and failures have been had by other knitters.  I learned I like the Sunrise Circle best with more overlap in front, that tweed yarn is highly preferred, and that the knit fabric needs to be relatively firm.  The first two are my own opinion, but I can’t stress enough how valuable it is to see that other knitters can produce an attractive garment from this pattern.  Have you ever searched for a pattern only to come to the conclusion that it only looked good in the photo shoot, but just doesn’t work in real life?

In this case, it was the yarn that drove pattern choice. I’ve have a bag and half of Debbie Bliss Aran Tweed in my stash for a while – it was an eBay bargain.  While I think the yarn is okay (after knitting with Baby Cashmerino cotton/rayon this is SCRATCHY) and well suited to this pattern, in the future I’d much rather match the pattern to the yarn BEFORE I buy it.

I finished the back of the sweater the first week and now, after a long weekend of knitting in the car, I have both sleeves complete up to the armpits.  This is where it gets interesting! Every knit row from here out is different as you begin decreasing for the raglan sleeves and increasing to create the semi-circular front. At this point I figured it was best to start a different project. 

These basic socks will be my new carry-along knitting.  I’m just using a simple pattern I’ve knit before so I don’t need to bring any instructions along with me.

Coming tomorrow – photos of where we were over the weekend.