The editor and several contributors to Knit Lit had a reading at the Booksmith today. They scheduled it to coincide with our weekly knitting group so we could all come and bring our knitting. It was great fun and the stories were beautiful and sweet and funny. If you haven't checked out the book yet, you should!

Unfortunately, I ended up being that annoying woman who keeps having to get up and go outside. You know there's always one of them. I'm just not used to it being me. First, I arrived a few minutes late, since I totally forgot that it wasn't regular old normal knitting group and I parked a ways away and enjoyed my stroll to the store through the lovely fall weather we've finally been having. Then I just had to pee - I'd been thinking about it the whole way over - so I had to get up and run out to the coffee shop next door. And then, my husband called twice (during a very touching story about a dying grandmother) because the boys had gotten into the Balmex and he didn't know what to do. But, thankfully, after the first twenty minutes, all my crises were resolved (they didn't eat any Balmex and certainly not enough to be harmful) and I was able to enjoy the stories and even managed to knit some!

While I was there, I cast on for the first sleeve of the crazy continental. After spending way too much time yesterday doing all the math to come up with a sleeve that I liked in my gauge, I was excited to finally start it. I'm doing a wide full-length sleeve. The body of the sweater should be pretty form fitting (I hope!), but I wanted the sleeves to be kinda hip and loose at the wrist. So, I decided to start with the full number of stitches (about one third of the body stitches, says Elizabeth Zimmerman) and do a straight sleeve up to the raglan shaping. Reading Knitting without Tears again almost convinced me to do the sleeves in the round, but then I remembered that the point of the crazy continental was to practice knitting and purling with my left hand. And since I'm getting practice knitting with my left hand while doing the fair-isle work on the Dale sweater, there was no way out of doing the purling here. And speaking of the Dale sweater, I'm just past the ribbing and am about to start the pattern on the body. Stay tuned!