TA-DA!

Here is DH’s totally finished sweater and DH in it!

And he’s actually still wearing it!

For those of you who may not have been following the sweater saga, I’ll explain. This sweater was started July 1st 2003 with the intention of being a Christmas gift for DH. I actually bought the fiber, Black Blue Faced Leicester, in mid-June when I began planning the sweater. On July 1 I started spinning the yarn, in secret, working mostly at the spinning group I was going to or when DH was at work. After several months of spinning I began to knit the sweater. I had started as a bottom up sweater based on the size from another sweater I know he likes. I had knit almost to the underarms when I got overwhelmed with all the other holiday knitting last year. When Christmas came, I ended up showing it to him 1/2 knit and still 1/2 spun. Well, good thing I did since it turned out to be about 10 inches too big around! Over the next few months I managed to finish spinning the yarn, much easier when your not hiding it ;) and I ripped the sweater out to start over as a Top-down Raglan. I finished the yoke and had one sleeve only to find the sleeve didn’t fit, his arms are not shaped the way the formula works out! I wound up knitting the first sleeve or portions of it 3 times before it actually fit! Then I put it down for months before picking it up again to work on it this fall. When I did, my notes from the first sleeve made no sense so I had to try to read the actual sleeve to do the second one. Once that was done it didn’t take too much longer to finish the body which was done something like 6 or 8 weeks ago. Today I finally sat down to weave in the ends so he could actually wear it. Given that its about 20 degrees F here today he may start to actually need it, especially finishing the barn before the heat gets put in out there (which may be weeks away). And that is the story of the sweater!