Absense makes the heart grow...

I'm shocked. Over the last 6 days, I've been monogamously knitting on my sweater, to the exclusion of every other project (what? those needles by the computer desk? it was nothing, I swear! a harmless fling).

I finished the left arm about a month ago, and this weekend I knit the body up to the armpits, where I'm supposed to join the arms before I start decreasing for the shoulders. The only problem is that, as far as I can tell, the right sleeve is the one I need to attach first.



Sleeves knit up very quick, and I'd definitely finish it by tomorrow night, except The Dude is coming home this evening and he'll probably want a lil Me Time.



This yarn is Elann Peruvian Sierra Aran, which is a wool/alpaca blend. This apparantly means that it's got all these fibers coming out all willy nilly, but it's surprisingly soft and supple when knit and I know the frizzy parts will matt down a bit when I block it. At least, that's what happened with the gauge swatch.

Two of the skeins (out of about 7 used so far) have had small knots joining the yarn. I'm pretty much OK with that - I wind the yarn into balls first to catch this sort of thing. But, I'm less ok with this:
No, that's not a shadow. It's a little piece of black thread in one of the plies. I'm afraid that if I cut it out, the yarn will start to unravel. If it was on the back of the sweater, I'd probably just ignore it, but it's going to end up being right smack dab in the middle of my chest. Not attractive!

My options, as I see them:

1. Cut out the offending spot and darn it up with some leftover yarn,
2. Try to excise that one part of that one ply and hope it doesn't start to unravel unattractively, or
3. Double-stitch over that spot and hope it doesn't show.

Really, all of my options seem pretty lousy. As they say, "A stitch in time saves nine." If I had caught this before I stitched it in, I could have broken the yarn around the spot and split-spliced it back together.