Bad news first

Two things:

#1: The bad news is that my local Barnes & Noble has either stopped carrying BurdaStyle, or they haven't gotten the November issue in yet. Which is a shame, because based on some previews I've seen on other blogs, I'm actually interested in picking this one up. There's this kimono-esque shirt and this kind of intriguing blouse that I could see myself making (the kimono shirt in particular), and this formal dress that falls into the category of "I wish I had an excuse to sew this." I'll check again next week, but I may have to wait and hope that those are some of the patterns that the BurdaStyle site is willing to share. They didn't have the latest SewStylish either, which was disappointing. I guess I could have looked at Threads, but I also needed to stop at the grocery store and didn't want to take a lot more time. So kind of a letdown on the sewing front. The good news (for my interest, not for my wallet) is that they did have all three of the knitting magazines I was thinking about picking up. So I got the latest KnitScene (love that magazine), a copy of knit.wear , and the special Jane Austen Knits issue that Interweave recently came out with. (I am also a sucker for all things Jane. And based on my initial flip-through, it looks like there's some potentially interesting articles too, all about things like how they dyed fabric back in the Regency era, a profile on a sewing pattern company that focuses on historic garments, etc.)

So in summary, bad B&N trip on the sewing front, great on the knitting one.

#2: The bad news is, I think I'm going to have to start the sweater over entirely. After ripping out about 7 rows and re-knitting some over the last few days, I discovered that the mistakes apparently go back further than I'd thought, because there's this one section where I still didn't have the right number of stitches to follow the pattern, and had to keep trying to compensate. It's a bit of a mess. Also, when I tried it on, this thing is off-the-shoulder huge. I think the neckline stretched while I was waiting for step 2, because it was always a tight fit around that circular needle. So as much as I hate to do it, I think I may have to just start again. I'm debating whether it should be one needle size down.

The good news is, with all of this handling of the yarn I've been doing over the last couple of days, my hands are feeling no ill effects. So I think I can now safely say that my wool sensitivity does not extend to alpaca. (Now if only they'd make alpaca fabric as a substitute for wool...)