Stornoway: almost home!!

I really don't know in all honesty quite *what* possessed me, in the summer of 2009, to launch *three* small-gauge sweater projects by the same renowned British designer with a penchant for brilliant yet meticulous details, but there it was. Before I fully realized what I had gotten myself into, I had Stornoway, Eriskay, and Peggy Tudor all going at once. A wise and perceptive friend of mine says she chalked it up at the time to the symptoms of "post-Princess withdrawal," and that explanation makes as much sense as any other. But with a trio of St*rmores on the needles, NO WONDER it's taking me so long to whittle away at my list of WIP's!!

Progress does come, though, bit by bit, if you work at it steadily enough. I couldn't quite bring myself to sit with a heavy pile of wool in my lap during July and most of August, but in the last couple of months I have managed to put in quite a bit of time on the sleeves of my husband's Stornoway, since of the three it was the closest to completion, with a real shot at being done in time for the upcoming winter.

And now — happily, happily, HAPPILY — it's almost there. The first sleeve was all done as of September 11th, and I have only 10 more patterned rounds left on the second one before the ribbing of the cuff. Sometime in the next few days, in other words, I am actually going to *finish* the project!! And then I can put my shiny new woolly board to good use and rejoice in the countdown from 8 WIP's to *7*. Not quite yet, but very soon...

Meanwhile, as proof of my bona fides (as Anna Russell used to say in the midst of her classic analysis of Wagner's Ring, "I'm not making this up, you know..."), here are some pictures of the first sleeve and its lovely gusset at various stages of completion. As always, click on any of these images to take a closer look.

This project has been a joy from start to finish, and can't wait to show it off, as the Great Guernsey Adventure continues.