Mom's shrug, finally

My mom asked me to make her a shrug/bolero-type-thingie last summer. Dutifully, I bought the yarn right away. I swatched right away. I ran the swatch by her. She picked a pattern. And that's as far as I got.

Of course, I've been hearing about how she only asked me to knit her this ONE thing and I never finished it, and now I won't finish it before summer ends and she'll never get to wear it and how knitting for my mother should be my first priority.

Well, like the parable of the widow and the unrighteous judge, I got sick of hearing about it, so I put finishing the jacket in my spring goals. On the day that I was leaving for Cleveland for my job interview, I pulled out the swatch, measured, and calculated out the back. Since I spent 14 hours on the bus that weekend, I got the entire back knitted and started on a front, and finished it in short order from there.



Mom got her bolero on Saturday, just in time for Mother's Day. Oddly, she likes it, and not-so-oddly, it fits. What's even more surprising, I loved working on it. It had all the hallmarks of something I'd hate to make: it was for someone else, it was in cotton, it had to suit another person's tastes, and it had to be done on a deadline. But I loved doing it. I couldn't put it down. I even literally wore a cut into my guiding finger because I knit on it for so many hours straight.

And I'm very pleased with the result. It features a straight, slightly cropped silhouette; cut-away fronts with a generous V-neck; 3/4 sleeves; and a scalloped crocheted edging that I'm quite proud of. It was made in Elann Sonata DK mercerized cotton, on size 6 needles.



This was completely done by the seat of my pants. I had the general dimensions of the thing planned, and used the Snowflake Lace motif out of -- you guessed it -- Barbara Walker's 2nd Treasury, but that was it. Everything was made up spur-of-the-moment, and generally not well thought-out or pre-planned. I actually took enough notes to replicate the pattern, if I wanted, but the sleeve cap, I never got it right, so it's not getting written.