Blogtoberfest: Day 1

So I'm going out on a blog limb here and am joining Blogtoberfest.

The basic premise behind Blogtoberfest is that you (attempt) to blog every day in the month of October. So that's what I'm going to try to do. Let's keep our fingers crossed, but I make no promises. 

Getting October off on the right foot though, I do have a lot of works-in-progess to talk about. I tend to try not to have a bunch of things going at once. I'm definitely more of a product than process knitter. I hate that when I have too many WsIP it takes me ages to finish anything. At least I know that those WsIP will fuel the blog posts for a bit. 

Last night I finally cast on fro my Brother's Sweater.  I mentioned this back at the end of August, when I first bought the yarn. Since then, it's been sitting in my knitting basket, untouched.  I had swatched though. So when last night I had a wee bit of insomnia, I decided to finally do the measurements and figure this puppy out. For this sweater, I'm going to attempt to use Elizabeth's Percentage System via Knitty, as well as the glorious Knitting Without Tears by Elizabeth Zimmermann herself.

I'm also using a third resource that I picked up recently: Knits Men Want by Bruce Weinstein.  This has a lot of schematics and measurements for various sizes of men's garments. Since my brother lives 2,500 miles away, I thought it would be helpful to have some more standard measurements to use even though my mother did measure him a few weeks ago. I'm going to sort of mesh the two sets of measurements. 

See?

So anyway, like I said, last night I did some of my own calculations

and now I've cast on and done two inches of ribbing for the bottom of the sweater. 

I'm knitting it back and forth, not in the round (I didn't have steeking on my to-do list for this year. I can't be all gung-ho about everything).  Now that the two inches of ribbing is complete, I have about 13" of stockinette to knit before I can get to the arms. I figure this will make for some good car/mindless knitting. I really love the wooly smell of the Lion Brand Fisherman's Wool. I can't wait for this piece to start growing because I think it's going to make a nice, cozy and warm fabric. 

I only have one other project on my Christmas knitting list but it's for Adam and I'm going to use a pattern so it shouldn't be as much of a challenge. I also have some more sample knitting projects that will be started soon. Finally, I have a huge (at least for me) announcement to make mid-October. I'm really excited to share that with everyone. Maybe I will be able to keep up with this Blogtober business.

There's still time to enter this giveaway!