It has been raining since January 16th, to be precise. Knowing how badly we need it, I haven’t wanted to complain. Kept telling myself how good the moist air is for the skin. Kept breaking out the baseball caps and my Indiana Jones felted wool hat to keep the rain off my glasses when I venture outside. Kept poking around in the garden to see what new spring bulbs are sprouting and budding. Kept brewing comforting cups of tea while working indoors. You get the idea.

But lately, early every morning when I first open the drapes to face the day, it feels as if we live in Seattle, or another equally rainy location. There has been such dense fog in the mornings that we cannot see the hills behind our house until well into the afternoon, if at all. For nearly two weeks now, the pool appears to be on the verge of overflowing, and don’t even get me started on the picturesque way the french drains around the perimeter of the house have backed up, forming small pools in their own right as they make agonized gurgling noises. So all right already. Enough is enough. Not that I can do anything about it.

Much knitting going on off-camera, but a bit here and there that I can share. Yes, the February Lady Sweater now has one complete sleeve. I may yet get to wear it in February, as I hoped. By the end of next week, I’ll have a break in the secret knitting projects and hope to complete the other sleeve then. Working this sweater has been a tremendous learning experience for me. I seldom knit garments from the top-down, and the FLS has me wondering why I don’t do it more often. The construction is almost ridiculously simple, although the absence of seams gives the finished garment – at least to my mind – a bit less structure, less of a framework for stability.

And this project has given me the opportunity to experiment with shorter circular needles to work up the sleeves. I had high hopes for the 7″ long KA bamboo circs I purchased a while back (Unicorn Books & Crafts, Inc.), but found them waaay too short to work comfortably on these sleeves. So I bought a pair of the Addi 12″ long metal circs, and found them so slippery that I eventually gave them up for my trusty double-pointed bamboo needles from Clover. Just call me Goldilocks, but the dpns worked just fine until I came within the last few inches of the sleeve cuff. Then I switched back to the Addi circs, determined to give them one more try. I don’t really understand the difference, but this time they worked just fine; my stitches were in no danger of slipping off, and the length worked well for a sleeve knit in the round. Perhaps the sleeve was long enough at that point that I wasn’t worried about the bulk of the sweater body bogging me down. Whatever it was, I am now a convert.