The 2020 Iknitarod

I'm starting this post with my 2020 Ravatar because if I led with the picture of the actual project, everyone would just pass on by because you've seen this yarn so. many. times.  

For the 2020 Iknitarod...I am knitting the Renny sweater!  

I think about the Iknitarod off and on all year long and some time ago I picked this sweet gray dog to be my Iknitarider.  I had originally planned to spin and knit a Jared sweater and have been tossing patterns around for months.  I could never settle on one though and I kept feeling bad about never knitting the Renny sweater and when it dawned on me that Charcoal had something in common with Renny, I knew what I was going to do.

"Are you sure?  That is a LOT of color!" ;-)

Like many animals on our farm, Charcoal was a rescue.  In his early life he had worked hard in a grade school classroom.  So hard that he ended up with a patch on his backside, just like Renny :-).  When his teacher retired, she took him home with her and kept him until she found a new home for him...and he eventually ended up with me.

With the dog connection to Renny - the bad dogs who caused her to end up here in the first place and the good dogs who took care of her for the rest of her life - and how old those dogs have all become, this year the dogs are center stage, along with Comby, who is a close to a dog as a cat can get :-).  And of course Renny is there, too, up in the stars.

I am knitting the Icelandic Star pattern.  The pattern is written as a bottom up sweater.  It's written to be knitted flat, back and forth, not around and around to then be steeked.  If you remember waaaay back, learning to do a steek was one of the original goals for the original Renny sweater.  I'd link all those old posts here, but even I don't want to revisit them (and I'm hungry and want to go eat lunch ;-).  

I have done the math to convert the pattern to be knit in the round.  I am worried about running out of yarn, so I've also done the math to convert it to be knit top down.  And, just to throw in one more challenge, I am between sizes so I've done the math to create my own personal size.  What could go wrong... ;-D.

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As always, I encourage you to follow along with the actual race at www.iditarod.com.  The Insider coverage is fantastic!  I'll be posting my usual daily Iknitarod updates on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter and the Iknitarod group is in full swing and we have several on the scene "reporters".