Pictures of the sweater

After a little over an hour of knitting on Friday night, the February Lady Sweater was here:

I took that picture on Saturday morning, but it honestly represents where I stopped on Friday night. I wanted to make sure that the buttons would fit through the hole I was leaving for them, too. All in all, it was a satisfying experience. I have to admit, though, that I spent a few minutes panicking because I didn't know what PM meant in knitting instructions. I eventually worked out that it means "place marker". I guess it makes sense to have a short form for that.

On Saturday, I finished my first ball of yarn. It wasn't all that far in; I suspect that it was a ball some yarn had already been used from. The ball band was off it and some of the yarn was re-wound. I was going to do my usual thing of tying a knot to attach one ball to another, but in the spirit of doing things beautifully, I decided I would see if spit-grafting would work on this yarn.
I have limited experience with spit-grafting. I learned how to do it from Eunny Jang's sadly defunct blog "See Eunny Knit". Basically, you take two ends of yarn, tear out 1/2 of the fibres for a short distance on both, twist the ends together so that the two 1/2-thick bits are overlapping (into one full-thickness bit) and then you get it wet (that's the spit part) and smoosh it around until it's felted together into a single strand. I knew I needed to practice because I didn't have any idea how well the yarn would felt. The above picture shows that the practice worked just fine. I've now grafted twice on the sweater and even though it's a bit of a pain to smoosh the yarn with a great big object attached to one end, it seems to be doing the job nicely.