Ogle this, baby

Some of you may remember the knitwear from Alexander McQueen's F05/06 collection. I think it made its way around the knitblogworld last year. In case you don't remember or didn't see it, this red sweater dress and this brown suit were a couple of the highlights. You can also check out Alexander McQueen's website to get slightly better glimpses of the collection, but you'll have to wade through some Flash.

I have been dying to see the real thing, for any sort of high end RTW chunky knitwear really, just to get an idea of how the pros do it. Well guess what I have in my hands. Guess guess guess! YES, I have the one of the awesome brown bobbly cardigans, and I am ECSTATIC. No, I don't get to keep it, but for the next few hours, I'm going to examine the hell out of it. I'm afraid I'm going to miss some details, so I thought a few things would be fun.

First, take a look at these pictures and tell me how you think it's constructed. I'll give you a hint: It's NOT at all how I expected. You can click on each image and navigate through Flickr to view the huge full size image with more details. (I love Flickr, but getting to the full size images is not always obvious.)

This sweater retails for $1500+ (no, that second zero is not a typo), so I'm trying to be extremely careful with it. I'm also trying to learn as much as I can during this brief affair, but I'm afraid I'm going to miss a detail. It's a bit hard trying to look at the dark brown yarn at night, and I'm not very good with things like differentiating cast-on methods by sight. I'll try taking more detail shots tomorrow. This is the closest I'm ever going to get to high fashion knitwear!

Oh yeah, and despite the huge price tag, there isn't a gram of cashmere or qiviut in it. It's a blend of wool, alpaca, and ACRYLIC. I'm sure the yarn snobs out there are fainting right now. But the workmanship is certainly very interesting. Though the sweater leaves tomorrow, I probably won't get to post again until later in the week. If there's anything you can think of that I should look for, let me know before tomorrow. Every time I start trying to wrap my brain around it, I go crazy.

And, in case anybody wants to "donate" to a worthy cause, HeyJulie came up with a brilliant idea for finding money to get a spinning wheel for herself. For every $10 donated, she will spin the donor 50g of yarn once she's got the skillz down. I soooo would love handspun sock yarn! She set up an info page here.

Unfortunately, I haven't knit much, but I did bake some more of those molasses spice cookies. I don't have the big sugar though (that was K's). And I actually read the recipe reviews this time around and took some of the suggestions such as cutting out some of the sugar, replacing some of the granulated sugar with brown sugar, upping the molasses content, and upping the spices. They're not as sickeningly sweet this time around, but definitely still yummy!

Oh yes, and to answer the questions about Titania's Revenge, the pattern is currently only available through the sock club. Sorry!