A Little Zebra a Lot of Yellow

Well, that's it.  At this point I have pretty much done most of the interesting knitting on the Zebra Striper jumper project (except for a bit of duplicate stitch and some detailing around the arms and neck.  Now that the colorwork is done I have an ocean of yellow stockinette to knit through, punctuated by the occasional decrease row as the dress slims from bottom to top.  Believe it or not, I am happy about this.  I enjoyed the color work a great deal, but I wanted to have at least one project that required no thinking in my current batch.  This one has now become perfect for apres-nursing TV watching and for any other time I need something to just relax with.  Lace knitting may provide me with a mantra to meditate on, but simple stockinette lets my hands stay busy while my is free to wander.

But I couldn't let this post go by with just a small picture of the overall project.  After all, this is the project that helped me get my two handed two color knitting mojo going.  With simple motifs and a long long way around, it was perfect for that task.  My stitches are hardly perfect, but I suspect with a little blocking most of the most egregious problems will be eased away.  Though the fabric puckers now, it's easily pulled into a better shape. 

The zebra stripes are an excellent demonstration of the importance of choosing carefully which hand you carry your yarn in.  Since I am still only moderately proficient carrying the yarn in my right hand, I always carried the yarn that was going to get used the most in my left hand.  In the case of the zebra stripes, this was the black yarn.  However, I think it would have been better if I had been more patient and carried the black in my right hand since the white seems to get lost under some of the black stitches and the black is a little more dominant than I think it should be in the design.  A good lesson for the future, I think.

I'm enjoying knitting with the Baby Ull.  Even though the gauge is tiny, it moves easily through my fingers and isn't as splitty as I might have expected a superwash yarn to be -- something that makes knitting in the dark more do-able since I don't have to stop all the time and be worried about whether I missed a ply or whether I'll have little slubby areas in the fabric that I don't want to have there. 

It's a long haul project -- but when Ms. Z comes up to touch it and then gives me one of her megawatt smiles I know it's going to be more than worth the effort.