That's a wrap

So, it's been a few days since I last posted. It's just been rather busy over here. Tonight, DH is on overnight call at the hospital (he's a doctor) so it gives me a bit of a chance to provide an update and get some extra knitting in. Speaking of knitting, the first sleeve has been going pretty well:


Here's my progress! I had the very ambitious goal of being done with the sleeve by tonight for my post..but I still have a few more inches to go. It's starting to slow up row by row with all of the increases...but I'm happy with how it's looking so far.

I've been reading a few posts about the Manly Sweater over at www.craftster.org and it appears as though people have found the sleeve on this sweater to be too long. So, I will be shortening it as I get to the sleeve cap. I still have about 20 more rows until I get to that point though. But, I measured DH's arm from the top of the shoulder - and it's about 20 inches..but the sleeve is knitted to ~ 24 inches long. So, I'll be playing around a little with that in a bit.

In other news, the big unveiling of the afghan occurs tomorrow. We're going out with the newly engaged couple - we haven't seen them since they got back from their little vacation on Monday. Anyway, I read in a bunch of articles that the key to getting a good reaction to a knitting gift is to wrap it. So, after all of the time I spent knitting the afghan, I wasn't going to cut corners by not wrapping it. Well, DH and I went to this specialty paper store to do this because I wanted some sort of box to put it in. While we were there, we were so taken with all of the gorgeous wrapping papers and ribbons that things got a little out of hand...so, here's the wrapped gift in all of its glory:


Gorgeous, right? I mean it certainly does justice to the gift inside, but I don't think I need to tell you how much the paper and the ribbon cost. They better appreciate it!!!! DH and I were commenting that we've never gotten anything wrapped as beautifully as that before. Regardless, I don't think I'll be doing that again - it's just too expensive. I think in the future I'll just stick to buying the cardboard box for $7.50 (which isn't exactly cheap either) but then using regular wrapping and regular ribbons from a pharmacy. Well, I'll let you know about their reaction after tomorrow evening.

Well, I think that's it for now...I really want to make some more progess on this sleeve before the evening is out.

Enjoy the rest of the weekend everyone!!