Happy Friday, everyone–we made it!!! In a rare moment of good knitting timing, I have a FO for you this morning! Behold: the Crazy Sweater.

It is the Tiny Shoots pattern from Kate Heppell, and I would just like to say I think she did a fine job of designing this sweater. If she’d added a small manual on how to substitute appropriate yarns, and then a small encyclopedia on how to modify a cap sleeve when you have only the faintest idea how that whole sewn-in-sleeve things works, it’s possible I would have had less trouble with the design, but a small note reading “If you totally mess up the sleeve shaping because you substituted yarn and changed both stitch and row gauge, that’s your own darn fault” might have been helpful too.

I finally got the sleeves right enough, and all of my coworkers have sworn up and down they can’t tell there’s extra fabric around the armholes where I think I was supposed to be doing a decreasing thing and didn’t.

About the yarn…it’s Noro sock yarn, one skein won in a blog raffle, the other purchased so I could knit a little top. I purchased the pattern at a fundraiser discount, so they seemed like a good idea to put together. Erm. The Noro is very grippy, which I believe is entirely different than the BFL called for in the pattern, so maybe that wasn’t a great choice. But the pattern is a nice simple canvas for this shout-at-the-top-of-its-lungs color scheme.

The color scheme seemed a bit over-the-top in Arizona. Normally, I like natural colors: leaf greens, browns, and dark blues. But when I picked the top up again after the wedding, when Kansas was leaving winter behind, I started to realize the electric lime and magenta could be natural colors too.

Contrary to the endlessly, bitterly freezing winter I was promised, winter wasn’t so bad. But once Spring decided it was coming, it came with a vengeance. Electric green buds popped up on all the trees, making the pines on the hills look darker. Farmers set their fields alight (still can’t get over the fact that that’s legal), and they glowed magenta at night around the town. The fields were black for a while, but then they came back more green than ever, and all over flowers were popping up in yellows, whites, and every shade of purple. The sky became intensely blue, and the squirrels and robins popped out of nowhere to industriously hop about, rooting around for all the things they nibble on and exhibiting to anyone who might have any lingering doubt that spring was here.

I went back through my photos to see if I had any properly representative pictures of this time, but I didn’t. I couldn’t think why, until I remembered that the best view I had of spring doing its crazy dance was when I was driving around town, and crested the top of the hill above town. From that one spot in the middle of the road, you can look out across the river valley and see all the trees, and the fields, and the hills beyond this valley, and in spring, that view was to die for. But I never decided to actually take my life in my hands to capture that view, so I will spend the next few seasons scouting around for places where it is possible to take photos without causing a six-car accident.

We have left spring behind now for a slightly moody summer, but that flat-out mad dash from cold blah winter to ALL THE SPRING is still vividly imprinted in my memory. I have renamed this sweater Kansas Spring.