Stashbusting Goals: Sweater(ish Sort of Thing)s

Hokay, so.  I'm finding it really (really really) helpful to list out all of these things I'm hoping to knit this year.  So here's another list, for fun and profit!  (Although not actually profit.  Unless perhaps you count Money Not Spent On Yarn as profit.)

If you take a quick peek at my projects page on Ravelry, you'll notice that I'm not much of a sweater knitter.  I have knit a handful of sweaters and enjoyed it, but I have two major problems when it comes to knitting a sweater project: first, that despite loving clothes, I have very little idea of the type of sweater that is actually flattering to me, and second, I tend to buy in single skeins of things like laceweight or fingering weight, which translates to not that many sweater's worth of anything in my stash.

Which is not to say I have absolutely no sweater's quantities in my stash.  I do.  But they tend to be for little shells, short-sleeved numbers, and such.  I've found that once I have a sweater shape that works for me, I do wear it.  The best bets for me so far are little fitted shells, drapey vest-like layers, and big cozy sweaters.  These are the garments I actually reach for (on purpose!) when I'm wearing my hand-knits.  (On a slightly related tangent: The little vintagey mohair lace sweater that I knit as a shop sample was absurdly fun to make.  Why don't I do this more?)

I am hoping to keep my aspirations reasonable, though, by taking my measly sweater-knitting from last year and tacking on 1 extra sweater.

So, my goal is to knit 4 sweaters in 2012.

1.  Zelda by Joan McGowan-Michael, using 6 skeins Mirasol Tupa (822 yards) (In progress since November 2011)

2.  Dominique (2nd picture of Preview) by Mathew Gagny, from Knitting off the Axis, using 8 balls of Portland Tweed (960 yards) (In progress since December 2011)

3.  Rosamund's Cardigan by Andrea Pomerantz, from Interweave Knits Fall 2009, using 9 skeins of Elsbeth Lavold Chunky Al (738 yards)

4.  Bubble Pullover (rav link) by Norah Gaughan, from Knitting Nature, using 5 skeins of Cascade Lana Bambu (980 yards)

    

All told, that's 3,500 yards,

or

1.9886 miles.  (Can I just say holy crap, here?)

Two of these sweaters I already have on the needles and need to get cracking on.  The turquoise alpaca is deep, deep stash: I bought it when I was on leave from college for a year back in 2006/2007, which is only six months or so after I got really into knitting.  It's hipster alpaca - it was stash before being stash was cool.  I've had Rosamund's Cardigan queued for a long time and had begun to lose faith in my pattern choice, but then I saw a knitting friend's super cute version and my faith was restored.  The Lana Bambu is about the same color of a sweater I used to have and wore literally to death.  I brought it with me to Indonesia and wore it every day I was there, then an unfortunate washing accident rendered it fun-sized when I got home.

I'm really crossing my fingers that I can get myself motivated enough to knit me some sweaters.  Hopefully, the Lists will save the day!

All sweater images copyright their designers and/or publishers.