The Reclaimed Sweater

Been a long time since I've written: Mea culpa, mea culpa. Life tends to grab me and run away at top speed.

This past week, I got my hands on a yarn winder for half price at JoAnn.com, and I've been using it with my umbrella swift to wind up any and all hanks of yarn I have lying about the house.
This also means that I finally had the tools to frog my Malabrigo merino poncho and ball it up for a new project.

I loved my poncho: It was my first big project, the first larger-than-a-scarf garment I was actually able to wear, and the Malabrigo meant it was insanely soft and cuddly. I'd been looking at it lately, though, and finding some amateurish mistakes: Parts where the stitches were seriously uneven, parts where the pick-up for the hood gapped and pulled and left holes, parts where I'd dropped stitches and never noticed. That poncho was always warm and something I was incredibly happy to wear, but I knew the longer I wore it, the more it would come apart and eventually fall apart irreparably.
So I took it apart and salvaged the yarn, frogging the six to seven skeins by winding it onto the swift, and then wound it up into a center-pull cake on the winder. (Which prompted the fiance -- who had patiently helped me with the project by playing engine to keep the swift rotating while I frogged lengths of yarn free -- to comment that the night's work sure looked pointless now.  ... I then grinned at him and reminded him that all the hanks of yarn I get require winding into balls, and the balls are then knit into projects, and that's all part of the process rather than wasted effort -- and that seemed to leave him a little more gratified.)

I'm now halfway through the back of a modified Roam -- I'm opting out on the seed stitch, since my left wrist started hurting when I was working up a Roam as written (in the shade redwood forest of fingering-weight Memories), and because the Malabrigo is decidedly heavier than DK weight, I've had to do a little math to keep it sized appropriately. I'm having fun doing it at any rate, and I'm getting to intermittently cuddle my Malabrigo again.

Honestly, I love that wool. If only it weren't so expensive, I swear I'd use it to the exclusion of all other yarns... Excepting for the friends of mine that are wool sensitives, of course, but for me? I'd live in the stuff, especially since they seem to now offer it in both lace and chunky weights, and I'm pretty much hopelessly in love with all things merino.

I'm rather fixated on the current pseudo-Roam I've got going, though, so with any luck I'll have pictures of a finished hoodie in the next couple of weeks.