My Marathon Sweater

I can pretty confidently say that I'll never run a marathon, so knitting this sweater is probably about as close as I'll get to experiencing what it must be like to run in one.

It took forever.
99% of the time it was incredibly boring, but 1% of the time it challenged my atrophied brain cells.
And I felt like quitting approximately 123 times.

But, in the end, I finished because sometimes I like to show my knitting who's boss.

Now I should say that the negative feelings that I may have about this sweater have nothing to do with the pattern (which is Boxy by Joji Locatelli).  The pattern was well written and I have absolutely no complaints about it.  My gripe is really about learning the hard way what I like to knit.  And more importantly, what I don't like to knit.  Because that's really the main problem with this sweater - the miles and miles (and miles) of stockinette stitch.  I thought it would be perfect for mindless travel knitting, but it ended up being a little too mindless and I had a very (very!) hard time forcing myself to pick it up and finish it.

Now on to the details.  The pattern comes with directions to knit the sweater either flat or in the round.  I, of course, chose in the round, because I'll always choose to avoid the extra step of sewing up side seams if possible.  The sweater is knit in lovely hand-dyed Manos de Uruguay Fino yarn.  I apparently like this color a lot because it turns out that it's the exact same color way as this sweater.  I modified the pattern to make it a bit smaller, and as you can see, it still ended up very...boxy.  The smallest size called for casting on 370 stitches and I cast on 330.  It was a pretty easy modification, but it did leave me scratching my head at times to figure out how this change affected the rest of the pattern.  Nothing that couldn't be sorted out with a little bit of math, but sometimes, I'm just not in the mood to sit my butt down and calculate knitting patterns.

I should also point out that this pattern is meant to  have some purling pattern around the shoulders but I was so frustrated by the endless knitting that in the end that I just stayed with stockinette stitch and I'm perfectly happy with the result.

But mostly, I'm happy that I'm done with this sweater.  It's by no means perfect, but it's done.  And that's perfectly good enough for me.