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Cheapest! Sweater! Ever! (And it doesn't wear badly, either.)

Materials: 6 skeins Peruvian Collection Highland Wool in Aubergine; 4 skeins in Claret; size 6 & 7 circular needles. 1 Ribby Cardi pattern.

Time: 3 months. But it went by quickly, if that makes any sense.

Cost: $30.

I don't know why it took me so long to complete this sweater, because it took very little time to knit. It's mostly stockinette and basic ribbing, so blocking and seaming were more difficult than making the pieces themselves. And yes, that includes the left-front piece that I had to completely re-knit because it was inexplicably 1.5" longer than the other. (Fortunately, I had tons of yarn left over, and the phenomenal price/quality ratio of the Highland Wool made it easy to overestimate yardage.)

This is the sweater of fabulous blocking. I'd been reading complaints here and there that the sizes listed for the Ribby Cardi run small, but I think that its perceived smallness might have something to do with, um, the ribbing. So I blocked the crap out of all of the sweater pieces before seaming them together, and it did a fine job of stretching out the arms. It actually made the body a little straighter than I would've liked, so I'll probably re-block it sometime to let the ribbing do its magic on the sides and bottom.

Sewing in zippers still sucks horribly, but I actually did a really nice job (by my standards) finishing this. I'm finally getting to be the master of mattress stitch, and have gained some fraction of the patience required to baste in a zipper neatly. (The zipper, by the way, is from Zipperstop, and despite the fact that the shipping costs five times more than the zipper itself the convenience factor and swift delivery definitely justified the extra dollar or two.) I doubled the mock-rib collar by adding a stripe at the top with the turning row, and sewed it down to the neck seam with the ends of the zipper placed safely inside.

I really dig the finished result. It was easy to make, and the close, cropped fit that I ended up with was precisely what I'd hoped for.