Anyone got Some Mojo to Spare?

I seem to be missing mine.

At times I am steady at it, at others I just can't haul it all out and work on it. Can we say heavy, awkward, and brain-consuming?

The most brain consuming part is how different it is from traditional fair-isle colourwork. Fair-isle is extremely structured and works with small motifs repeated over a row. It's what I'm used to and it makes a lot of sense to me. It just clicks.

This Norwegian stuff is quite, not completely, but quite different. Where fair-isle might pattern two colours 1-5-1-5-1-5-1 etc., this pattern does more like 1-7-1-9-1-9-1-3-1-4-1. Not only different intervals, but throwing in that even number after all the odds! You have to really watch yourself. (Knock on wood--no rip backs for me yet because of the pattern. Pat on back.)

And then there's this "rest of my life" that keeps pounding on the door of my available time. If it were just a week, I think I could have put it all off. But for two weeks? That was just a little too much to ask this time around. Bills to be paid, insurance claims to be filed, fires to build, [minimum amount of] laundry to do, etc, etc, you know how it goes.

But have I given up? NO! And a special shout-out is deserved by my number 1 and 2 cheerleaders, Bonnie and Patricia--thanks, guys!

I am on the brink of a three-day weekend and plan to use it, to wring every available stitch out of it. Yes, there will still be other things to do (cooking and laundry come to mind; the bathroom can wait til next week) but I will simply treat those as necessary breaks to the knitting.

Once I'm set up at home on my own couch with the fire going, I suspect it's going to be a lot harder to distract me. (Although the Olympic events do a pretty good job of it.)

I need to finish the front and back:

And then the sleeves:
They're a little longer than last time I showed you, but not a lot! But you have to admit they look very neat and well-ordered don't they. Partly because I have taken a trick out of the sock knitters' book and tucked the ball for each sleeve inside the sleeve!
Isn't that a clever trick! It does make it heavier to hold but totally worth it in my book.

One more note about the colourwork. It had never occurred to me before that knitting while reading a pattern is very similar to playing an instrument while reading the music. (I'm thinking of a piano where you can glance down at your fingers to see where they are.) The same sort of eye movements (read a bit of pattern, glance down; find your place in the pattern and read a little more, glance down...) and hand-eye coordination.

Fair-isle uses all the familiar chords and leads you along so you can almost guess where the melody's going. This Norwegian colourwork uses very unusual chords and jumps in unexpected intervals. (There's a lot of looking up and down from work to pattern.)

It's been fun learning a new tune.