Finding Time to Knit

So last night I did indeed get through working on a swatch for the Ashfield Cardigan. I'll be honest. I rarely ever do swatches for projects. I know that I'm a fairly tight knitter, so I often use a size larger needle (unless the called for size seems right to me for that particular yarn) and just start the project. Most of what I've made fits just fine but there have been a couple of projects that probably would have benefited from doing a test swatch first.

So for my swatch for this cardigan, I went ahead and started up a needle size. The pattern called for size 4. With the MCN yarn that I'm using, it's very "plump" and I just really felt that a 4 would make the fabric too tight. If that was truly what got gauge, then I was going to need to choose another yarn for this pattern because this wouldn't be a good match. So I started with a size 5. And that seems to have worked. When I measured my swatch, I was pleased to see that I match both stitch gauge as well as row gauge (I often don't get row gauge and have to make some adjustments in projects). So I started in on the pattern.

The cardigan uses a raglan shape and starts at the neck. I've gotten down through row 8 on the lace chart, which starts after a bit of working on the neck. I didn't measure what I have and my WIP is out in the front room and I'm in the back of the house, but I think that's about a bit over an inch of the cardigan started. It doesn't yet look like much since it's still just a long piece that rolls back onto itself. But I'm loving the feel of the yarn and the fabric feels pretty good, although perhaps a bit tight (it's that "plump" MCN). I hope it will drape nicely. I'll be able to tell that better as I go along.

Now to the title of the post. Before I had my son, I would have considered today's progress rather meager. "I didn't get much time to knit today," I would have said. After having a baby, I consider today's progress to be really great. "I found quite a bit of time to knit today," is my new saying. But very little of that time was an extended period. Instead, I had my knitting out and available all day and whether my son was sleeping, I grabbed it and knit as much as I could. Sometimes that was half a row and sometimes it was more. And I got a decent chunk of time in after putting him to bed for the night. This is my new knitting life and it's not too shabby. I just have to make sure to keep track of where I am in the pattern so that I won't get messed up and have to frog back.

How does it feel to knit like this, in bits of time grabbed here and there? Sure, part of why I started knitting was to relax and have something to give me a break from the stress of grad school. Can knitting like this still be relaxing? Absolutely. Although I have one eye on the knitting and one eye on my son to see if he's still asleep, I do find myself unwinding during these moments that I caught today. I think it's like sleep after having a baby: your body starts to adjust to not getting long periods of sleep and also learns to fall asleep quickly when a moment for sleep does arrive. Although I'm still tired on some days, I'm surviving with the broken sleep (sometimes my son wakes once during the night and sometimes every hour or two), heck thriving even. My knitting life can do the same. And by doing so, I can actually have a knitting life. It just might take me a bit longer to finish the cardigan than it would have before having a baby. Or maybe not as I often got sidetracked on other projects. Now my focus is on one project (with perhaps one other project) at a time which might lead to more finished objects and fewer works in progress. So perhaps everything will actually even out in the end.