I Heart My Dragons! Favorite Finished Object EVER. And, a Review of DROPS Air.

When you take the “softest and fluffiest yarn EVER” and combine it with the measurements from your favorite sweater and then throw in a couple of dragons… it’s REALLY hard to to wait for the finished project to manifest.

It feels like I’ve been working on the sweater forever, but looking back over my posts, it’s only been few weeks.  The anticipation has been brutal.

The end result is my favorite finished project that I’ve ever produced.  The sweater is soft, snuggly, warm and has a couple of dragons too!  Pure happiness is how I would describe my feelings about this sweater.

Choosing buttons that were worthy enough for my prized creation was not an easy task.  My preference is to take my project into the store and audition buttons.  However, the store with the best button selection (Joann Fabric around here) doesn’t carry enough cards of each button type to finish a sweater.  When you see the long aisle of buttons, it gives the false impression of ample selection.  But when you scratch the surface, you see that there’s usually only 3 to 6 buttons of any particular design.  I’d fall in love with a button and find that there were only 4 total buttons in the store- a stretch for the front of this sweater.

I finally settled on a silver filigree design with a shank.  There were only 6 buttons so I had to use a larger (but similar) button for the top.  You’d have to look very closely to notice.  And, I think folks will be too distracted by the glorious white creatures on the front to decide to inspect the buttons.

Along the way, I had to rip out the tops of all the sweater pieces because I mis-read my own directions and produced too-shallow of an armhole.  I also had to rip out the buttonhole band 4 times because my math for placement was wrong.  But, it did force me to come up with a new method for determining button placement that involves putting removable stitch markers where each buttonhole goes so I don’t have to rely on my own memory.  I cannot seem to watch TV and focus on knitting at the same time!

But I remind myself that with knitting comes frogging.  It’s inevitable.  And, I think it’s a good lesson and practice in patience for me.  Knitting forces me to take a deep breath, let it all roll off, and refocus.  I’m sure there’s another life lesson in there somewhere.

So, what was it like to knit with the “softest and fluffiest yarn EVER”?  It was awesome!  🙂  Because DROPS Air is a “blown” yarn and not a plied yarn, it weighs 30-35% less than conventional yarns which means this sweater feels light and fluffy.  Many of my sweaters weigh a ton but this one feels like wearing a cloud.  The yarn isn’t without it’s downsides, though.  It’s sticky and a bit difficult to frog.  Those alpaca hairs like to cling to each other and with the way that I seem to knit, frogging is a requirement.  However, it only required minimal scissor help to frog this yarn.  And, I was able to re-knit with the abused yarn.  This sweater consumed a total of 6 – 50g gray balls and a partial 50g white ball.   This yarn went a lot further than conventional 50g balls.

For my next project, I’m eyeballing the Hitchhiker shawl that many of my fellow knitting blogger friends have produced.  It looks like it would go very well with my hand-painted yarns and discourage color pooling.  While I mull over ideas for the next project, you know I’ll be ecstatically clad in a couple of white dragons.  🙂