I decided to weave in all my ends to finish my sweater absolutely. It was a cold, foggy, cold, damp, cold rainy day yesterday, so Nicky decided to come inside and get some lovin'. He thought it would be fun to jump up on the table and help me:

Nora is helping too, from a safe distance. I cuddled Nicky for awhile, then he left, and I finished weaving in all the ends.
Lynne came over and I thought she was going to say that she ran out of yarn for her sweater. This sweater needs a little back story here: back in 1986 or so, Lynne bought the yarn to make a raglan sleeved sweater, knit on it for a while, then for some reason neither of us can remember, she put it in the closet ... for 26 years!! Earlier this year, she pulled it out and decided to finish it. The pattern was nowhere to be found, and it looked to me like the amount of yarn needed to finish it was a little more than she apparently had.
She got online, found the pattern (I think it was an old Candide pattern), long out of print, found a woman who had the pattern on Ravelry, got a copy mailed to her, found where she was in the pattern, and resumed knitting. She knit steadily along, eyeing her rapidly diminishing ball of yarn. Things got busy and I didn't hear about the sweater for a long time.
Then she showed up yesterday with a very small ball of yarn, and a bag full of sweater. "Here," she said. "Finish it!"
I took the bag with some trepidation. My mind was already racing ahead to how we could get two colors of one-ply yarn, ply them together, and make a facsimile of the yarn she had purchased twenty six years ago. Imagine my surprise when I pulled out the sweater, complete, seamed, and beautiful!
Like me, she had just put her nose to the grindstone, and finished that sweater. She deserves a gold medal for jumping over hurdles that would have made other knitters throw in the towel and give up. Now we have both faced our challenges and can embark on the prize that we both want to knit, without fear of another unfinished object languishing before us, weighing on our minds.
I put my sweater on and was very comfortable in it; the day had become quite a bit colder. Nicky came and snuggled with me. He's used to sleeping on my sweater, so the fact that I'm wearing it makes it that much more snuggly. I like having a warm sweater on that a cat likes to snuggle in, better than sweater pieces in a bag by the window any day.
Oh, and I got Mouse 33 done yesterday too:
