Take Me To Your Leader

All inferior non-alpaca life forms should surrender now....

This is really the beginning of Norah Gaughan's lovely Bubble Pullover, which I have no doubt will be awesome, but at the moment it looks for all the world like a big green alien to me. Well, at least when it doesn't look like an extremely ample (yet green) bosom. You'll have to forgive me on that one, but once you finally have boobies, they get in your head. (One of the great joys of pregnancy - breasts! - who knew these things were so great?)

Seriously, though, back to the knitting. One of my favorite things about ravelry, and flickr, too, is that you can scope out a project ahead of time to see which colorways appeal the most to you. When I made the endpaper mitts I scrolled through tons of ravelry FO's to decide how I wanted to handle the colorway I had chosen. It may not sound complex, but with two colors, there are at least four different variations, and the way that you choose a dominant color really affects the final look of your fingerless gloves. Similarly, with the Bubble Pullover, there were certain FO's that really stood out for me, and invariably those were the ones which employed either heathered or mono-variegated yarn. I ended up not having anything in the stash that really did it for me for this project, so I put the design aside for a while, but then I stumbled on some lovely hand-painted Misty Alpaca (sadly, I believe it is discontinued) and voila! started anew.

A pretty, less extraterrestrial photo of the bubble.

I was a little afraid that the pentagons might bore me to tears, but so far, so good. I'm now on my fourth and still interested. My other fear about this pattern is that it would be difficult to re-gauge (and if you know me, you know that I end up re-gauging everything I knit - this is no exception). In fact, this is probably one of the easier re-gauging jobs I've done. As everyone says, the construction of this sweater is unique. It is not, however, complicated. I don't have any trouble envisioning how it will fit or if it will work. In fact, there is a little part of me that wonders if this will not become the third major route to constructing a sweater - top-down, bottom-up, and pentagonal! No wonder Ms. Norah is so entranced by these shapes - they really can go the distance.

I'm going to stop here, lest I write the pattern notes before completing the pattern. But I do highly recommend this sweater (or one of Norah's other many pentagonal creations) as a good time. I'm making my way slowly through this one (there are baby things to be made as well), but I know I will be so happy to wear it when it is done (well, in LA, several months after it is done). It should serve my not-quite-back-to itself belly quite well next winter. A bubble for a bubble.