Someone please take me to my happy place.

Why? Because I am the mother of a two-almost-three-year-old, and right now she is winning the war. It takes two hours to get her to stay in bed at night, then she's up before 7. Then she's cranky and crazy, and I feel like all I do is tell her to stop it. I am tired. But,

I finished my Soy Silk Sweater (pictured above). About the sweater: It is my own design, with the help of Rene Dickey, finisher and pattern customizer extraordinaire. She came and taught a custom pattern-making seminar at the shop in January, and this is what I wanted to work out. It was my first go at coming up with a tailored-to-fit sweater for myself, and overall I mostly pleased (schematics can be seen below). I chose to use SWTC Phoenix in black (for versatility), also known as Soy Silk (the flat tape version, not the round version which is called Oasis), and I swatched on size 8 needles. I wanted a 3/4 sleeve, boat neck sweater with side shaping, and not too long.

I am obviously wearing the sweater, so that's a good sign, but it does have some issues. The yarn was great, no complaints there. Issues are as follows:

• after decreasing for waist shaping, I should not have increased back to my same original number of stitches, but rather should have gone with about 8 less overall. It gaps just a little under the arms b/c of the bust being a little too big.

• when I tried it on after sewing it together, but before finishing the neck edge, it wouldn't even stay on my shoulders and just stretched to no end. But, I put a small ribbed finish on the neck and that stabilized it just enough to make it wearable. Next time I would probably make the boat neck shaping not quite as wide.

• the body needed more armhole shaping - there was too much sleeve to ease into the armhole when sewing them together.

Overall, though, a good first custom project, and now I've learned a ton to apply the next time. I like the overall shape of this sweater for my body type, so I will probably use it again with those above-mentioned modifications.

So! I'm done with a project that has been sitting around for a long time, and just in time to start the Pacific Northwest Shawl KAL. Yay! And don't worry - I'm still starting that Seta sweater.