After the great experience I had making my gray cardigan (of earlier post fame), I had been giving a lot of thought to getting a subscription to Amy Herzog’s Custom Fit site.  I had been kind of thinking about it for a while, but given how well my CF experimental sweater turned out, it was much more of a sure thing.

There are two levels of subscription – Maker and Maker Plus.  With either subscription plan you get a monthly sweater lesson (for example, September’s was on adding pockets) and access to a bunch of online tools and calculators.  The Maker subscription is $5 a month, and gets you 2 free patterns a month, while the Maker Plus subscription is $8 a month, and gets you unlimited patterns.

While I would like to think that I am Maker Plus material, I know that is actually not true. Maybe when I am retired.  For right now, Maker is about what I can handle.  I also spent a while hung up on 2 sweaters a month.  “24 sweaters a year!”  I thought to myself.  “There’s no way I can knit that much!”  Until I realized – you don’t actually have to knit them all within the year.  Just generate them and print them out.  Knit them later.  No one is actually checking that you finished the last one before you generate the next.  Sometimes it takes me a second.  Once I got past that, it was a pretty easy decision.  Also, in all fairness, if you make 5 patterns, that beats the cost of doing one-off patterns from the site.  So you don’t really even have to do all that!

So as you probably guessed – I bit.  So now I’m swatching – the first step in making the pattern of your dreams!  The sweater of my current dreams is Dockside, and I plan to knit it in some lovely deep red Cascade 220 I’ve had in stash for a while.

Right now I’m just focused on making sure I am going to like the fabric – then on to pattern generation!

Ixchel is proceeding along nicely. (More pics on that in the next couple of days) But it is close work on little needles with little yarn, and worsted weight on 6’s that I don’t have to even really look at is a nice little break for downtime knitting.