227 stitches

Thanks to an hour of knitting group on Sunday (an hour is better than nothing) and 4-5 hours of knitting yesterday out of 6.5 spent in the car (knit light + winding roads & hills = unpleasant knitting) has meant lots of Amelia progress. By the time I got home last night I was too tired to do anything but watch 30 Rock and Battlestar Gallactica from last week, which meant more knitting time. I was smart enough to get in bed about 10, but totally torn between wanting to keep knitting (I was SO close to the neckline) and not wanting to keep my eyes open. I compromised and knit for about 30 minutes more. :-)

2 rows on the bus this morning and then I was able to start the neckline decreases! So from the peak of 451 stitches, I'm now down to 227 stitches. And after the 5 additional rows of neckline bind-offs and raglan decreases, I'll be down to 169 stitches per row. So, so close! And the closer I get the less I want to put it down. Since I've never done a raglan sweater before and I have narrow shoulders, I'm a little worried about fit...so I'm anxious to be able to try it on and see if it works or if I need to rip back and modify it.

And for those of you non-knitters or beginning knitters who think I'm making knitting sound "hard", it really isn't. I'm just following the pattern. All of this math has been done for me. I'm just unnaturally excited by watching the numbers change. I totally admit to being a numbers geek.

p.s. I know that even thinking this is insane since we're going to have a newborn in about four months. But there is a little part of me that is tempted to consider the National Knit a Sweater a Month Dodecathon*, also known as NaKniSweMoDo. I would only do it if I included a couple of toddler sweaters for Heather, but I wouldn't include baby sweaters. (The last newborn sweater I made took me a week, so that seemed like cheating). If I knew I could maintain my current knitting mojo all year, I'm certain that I could do it, but knowing the dive that my mojo took after Heather was born makes me doubt that 2009 is the year even though the 9 sweaters worth of yarn in my stash are calling me...