Finally, the ungodly heat of the last several weeks has abated, and it’s possible to spend more than 2 minutes outside without expiring from heat prostration. I decided to celebrate the reprieve by going to a baseball game. The Birmingham Barons, our local AA team, were playing a home game against the Montgomery Biscuits; the ballpark is ten minutes away; the evening was warm and breezy; clearly, it was meant to be.

Obviously, I needed to decide on a knitting project to take to the park. It had to be easy (or how would I watch the game?) and portable. I looked at the eleventy works in progress and decided that none of them would do. The most urgent ones required charts and close attention, and the one simple project (the cardigan that never ends, about which I’m sure I’ll post later) had gotten pretty big, and required me to chain-ply a wingspan’s worth of laceweight at a time, which would mean BitterOldPunk would have to sit several feet away to avoid getting whacked in the face every five minutes. Alas, I would have to start a new project for the game. Cue hand to brow accompanied by dramatic sigh.

Fortunately, I had just the project. My nephew’s first birthday is coming up. He must have a sweater from his doting Auntie B. With the ludicrous amount of sock yarn in my stash, Hannah Fettig’s Sock Yarn Sweater was the clear winner: straight stockinette raglan, which I’ll do in 5-row stripes to keep it interesting (and keep track of rows without a counter). Simple, small, and on my list of Things I Must Make Soonish. I even had the yarn already: some lovely, soft Malabrigo Sock in Marine and Persia. Yep, this would be just the thing. I wouldn’t even bother swatching because hey, it’s a baby sweater: if it doesn’t fit now, it will eventually. If it’s too small, I’ll start again. I know this yarn, so don’t need to worry about it changing drastically when it’s washed.

Well, it was a good game, and I didn’t get much knitting done, though the attendance was…um…sparse:

Once I got started, though, I couldn’t put the damned thing down. The colours are playing so nicely together, and at five rows per stripe, it’s easy to get caught up in a just-one-more-stripe cycle. There are eleventy billion projects I should be working on, but I can’t. stop. making. stripes.