Preparing for a New Year

The Seamless Hybrid is complete. Check out that "shirt yoke" option in the saddle. My Goodness how I adore that Elizabeth Zimmerman. There were a few occasions when I thought "I must be reading this wrong" and even, I admit "this must be written incorrectly" but I wasn't. And it wasn't. It's sheer perfection.
I used Rowan's Yorkshire Tweed Aran in the "deep plum" color. It's a strudy feeling yarn as opposed to a cloud-soft deal, but it's not the slightest bit itchy; my husband is wearing it quite happily over a short-sleeved t-shirt.

I went for a 1" hemmed collar (I continued the double decreases in the front more for look than fit) and I'm very, very pleased with the outcome. I did not do fancy contrasting facing, and I thought I might regret that decision but I don't, at all.
This design is perfect for my husband - he has fairly scrawny shoulders and this hybrid saddle really seems to make them appear much broader. He has a classic saddle sweater and a few raglans. The raglans seem to accentuate the narrow shoulders and make his chest look pudgy (it's not) and the regular saddles are better but still cut a little funny across the chest. This sweater fits him perfectly and, in my opinion, really works with his body type. I'll be making him many more of these, to be sure. And being EZ, of course I can play around with stitch patterns and color to make them all different while using the same basic design.

I based the entire sweater on his chest measurement, as EZ suggests, and only tried on the cuffs of one sleeve (I had gauge issues as I got pregnant between making the body and making the sleeves and I could NOT match gauge. I ended up just putting it aside for several months while I waited for my fingers to return to closer to normal. Aside from that, the only real "issue" I had was in creating the saddle - there is a part of the instructions where EZ abandons her percentages and merely says "for 44 rows". Since my gauge was different from hers, I had been completely ignoring her numbers. So it took me a while, and a little calculation, to go back through her sample numbers and discover that she meant "50% of remaining stitches".

Other than that, I loved the experience, I love the final product, and my husband does, too. It was originally supposed to be a gift for our 10th anniversary together (September 15) then our 6th anniversary of marriage (November 11) then Hanukkah, then Solstice, and I finally finished it at 11pm on December 25. So at least it made it as a gift for some holiday, instead of just being an unceremonious "here, I finally finished."
I'm nearly finished with Martha's socks, too. I hope to see her in mid-January and they'll surely be finished by then. I have a ton of yarn left over, the socks are baggy, and a perfectly respectably high-crew length. I think I know why it's called Trekking XL now.

And finally, in "it's a small world" news, guess who I bumped into at Ikea? Annie Modesitt and family! I was glad to have been able to thank her in person for her ultra-generous donation of a signed book and a sample bracelet she donated to the auctions we held for the Professor. She was, as always, warm and smiling and I even got a big hug, right there in the middle of storage solutions. Were you looking for yarn storage, Annie? I was.