I think I jinxed myself when I mentioned my frogging spree in a recent post. Behold, the Anemoi Mittens:

On the left, we have a finished right mitten. On the right, we have the cuff of the left mitten in progress. Notice something different?

Mm-hmm. The second cuff is way bigger than the first.

What do I do? I could just rip the second cuff and start over, except that it’s actually the right size; the first cuff is a bit tight. Plus I’m not really happy with how the top of the mitten turned out.

But that involves frogging a whole mitten! At the rate I’m knitting these (it took me three whole weeks to do 24 rows of corrugated rib, because let’s face it, corrugated rib sucks), they won’t be done until April. On the other hand, this sort of size difference is exactly the type of thing that will bother me until kingdom come.

What to do, what to do…

While I figure that out, I think I’m going to go cast on for something simple. That doesn’t come in a pair. In a chunky wool.

This one gets my vote.

Pattern: Big Sack Sweater, by Jenna Wilson, Stitch ‘n Bitch
Yarn: Debbie Bliss Merino Chunky, #402, 19 skeins
Needles: US 8 and 10.5

So I haven’t been knitting much. But I need to post something with a picture to test the feed readers. And then the godawful bitter cold* gave me a flash of inspiration. So I present to you a blast from the past, the Big Sack Sweater.

This was my very first sweater ever, chosen specifically for the following properties:

• No shaping. It’s a big sack.
• No need for fitting. It’s a big sack.
• No complicated construction. It’s a big sack. With raglan sleeves.

And being the dedicated beginner I was, I knit a big gauge swatch for it anyways. I was right on the money. This probably made me overconfident for future sweaters.

I knit this sweater largely while I was scanning research subjects at the fMRI center for my first-year research project. Everything went pretty smoothly up until the neckline. (It’s a big sack. Hard to screw up.) I had no idea how to pick up a certain number of stitches. So I just sort of picked up stitches willy-nilly until I’d gone all the way around the neck opening, and knit the neck. The result was a neckline that was much too big. I finally fixed it this summer, arguably the first step in my great frogging adventure.

This sweater is hella awesome when it’s hella cold.

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*Perhaps what I really should say is this:

For those of you who live south of the 40th parallel, or who are blessed with moderate temperatures thanks to the ocean, OMG IT WAS SO COLD I DIDN’T LEAVE MY HOUSE FOR DAYS. I HAD TO CHOOSE BETWEEN HYPOTHERMIA AND AN ASTRONOMICAL GAS BILL.

For those of you who live north of the 40th parallel, like everyone back home who actually saw below-zero (that’s zero Fahrenheit) temperatures…well, it was a bit nippy, but tolerable. I just put on a sweater.

What can I say, cold tolerance is a badge of honor where I come from.