I am hard at work on the Gathered Pullover. It's a pleasant knit. The first part of it was spent in anticipation of the cable motif that goes on the front of it--it's only really interesting aspect as a project. I was especially looking forward to this because it's my first foray into cabling in my second life as a knitter. And I can still cable! No sweat, in fact.
I think of next step knitting, that is, the knitting you do once knit purl is boring, as being comprised of three things--lace knitting, cables, and color work. Of the three, I think I'd recommend cables to a new knitter looking for the next challenge. It's probably the easiest to master, so more likely to offer a success, and besides, there are all these cool cable needles out there. Perfect if you are an equipment geek, and who isn't? And this project is a good place to start on those cables. Just one enormous cable, then smooth sailing the rest of the way. Not like the sweater that Operations Man told me he wants--a monstrous man-sweater that is cabled from top to bottom. Maybe it would be better not to know how to cable, after all?
And just a side note, but did you know that ravelry has a feature called "friend's blogs", which allows you to keep up to date with the blogs of people you have friended on ravelry? Just discovered this yesterday. Talk about cool equipment. On the upside, it's easy to use. Just look at the top right of your "friends" page. There is a button that says, "friend's blogs". Press it, and it shows all of your friend's recent blog posting. I'm not even going to tell you what I used to go through to get to the blogs I read. On the down side, it looks like a timesaver that will turn out to be a time suck, since I am tempted to go out and add a bunch of people to my friends (read: a bunch more blogs to my reading list).
