cottington's so crafty: Paprika In Pink

This project was in the making for a million years, it seemed! The Paprika sweater by Elena Nodel is a lovely pattern and super easy to understand, but I, of course, had insane questions at a couple different points that definitely slowed down the knitting process - and the Christmas holiday intervened (what's up with that???), so, I had several days of no knitting at all. I was quite anxious, then, to finish it within a few days after Christmas, madly whipping out the button band at my ILs and getting the sucker finished!

But...back to those insane questions! Honestly, one of them was just me blindly skipping over the teeniest bit of instructions...way ridic. So, let's take a SPECIAL time-out to thank Jan, who helped me out a TON with my silly questions/ramblings.

Also, an IMPORTANT PSA: Please be smarter than I am and remember to print out ONLY the pages you need for your size - otherwise, you'll have a husband losing his mind over how your printer runs out of ink at the drop of a hat ;)

As for the yarn, I used Blissful Knits (FB page here), which I had ordered gosh...about a year ago???...specifically for this pattern. Camden wanted a pink sweater, so, I had to make that happen, right? The yarn worked beautifully for the pattern, and per the norm, I had to go down one needle size to get gauge for a pattern by Elena.

I'm not the fanciest of blockers, so, I'm sure the cables should have come out nicer after blocking, but ah, well. I TRIED to buy foam and T-pins to do it correctly, but EFFFF that when foam costs a million dollars (who knew???). I have better things to spend money on (read: bananas and chili ingredients). Another thing that is a slight fail, unless I can remedy it at the end of the month with a stop in at Twisted, is that I used only one clasp, rather than two. I didn't think of it when I was picking it up, and I realized upon arriving home, that I should have bought two. Such is life, but I would like the second clasp to alleviate pressure on the first.