Here's to fresh starts

News flash! From the desk of our intrepid reporter, I give you ... the new project!!

Remember all last winter when I was knitting mittens? I was trying to find some flat space to embellish with wool embroidery and wool appliqué.....and it had to be practical, ie, useful, because I'm a practical girl. Mittens seemed like a good choice. More recently, the baby blanket served the same purpose. Somewhere along the line, I began to think that knitting the mittens (or the baby blanket squares) was kinda the price to pay for having something to embellish. After the first pair, knitting mittens over and over again is not the funnest thing to do. That's when I got my fabulous new idea. If I could find something already knitted and waiting, I could eliminate the not-so-fun part. So, I made a quick trip to the Goodwill store. What I wanted was pretty specific, so I wasn't sure I'd find it on the first outing. I got lucky! I found a beautiful 100% wool sweater, plain as all get out (good thing). 100% wool is fairly common at Goodwill, mostly I think because people buy those sweaters and then realize they can't be machine washed and it's expensive to have them dry-cleaned. Of course, some of the sweaters at the Goodwill HAVE been machine washed (unfortunately), and they're shrunken and fulled as proof. This particular sweater had not been fulled. It has a full length zipper down the front which would have buckled if the sweater had been fulled. It's still perfect. 

And the colour!!! SO perfect! 

Of course, there's always a fly in every jar of ointment, right? See those sleeves? Does any human own arms that long? I think not. Maybe it was a fashion statement to have turned back cuffs, but for this project, the sweater fits me well, and I don't want another sweater with clumsy cuffs. The solution? Well, it's not for the faint of heart, but I've done it before. I removed the sleeves from the body of the sweater, and took out 3-1/4 inches in length from each sleeve, and then re-set them into the armhole openings. Again, this was only possible because the sweater was well-constructed. The seams were not overcast, and came apart quite easily. Replacing the sleeves allowed me to remove a little of the shoulder cap as well, which was poofing in a sort of out-dated way, and you know Grandma Coco is all about being fashionable. :) From the excess sleeve cap that I removed, I was able to unravel a good-sized ball of yarn which will probably come in handy somewhere in the project. Bonus!

Unlike the baby blanket, this project is going to start out with a moniker. The Smiley Sweater. The name will explain itself fairly soon, but for now, I just had to settle on a colour palette. This is what I came up with.

New beginnings are so exciting! There's so much promise and I haven't messed anything up yet.