Knitting = Service?

I recently took a little trip to San Francisco, where I promptly ran out of room in my suitcase. I decided to send some stuff home via UPS rather than buying a second bag to check (and paying the fee to check it), which made me feel pretty clever.

Except that I am an idiot...and wrote down my own zip code incorrectly.

So...UPS sent the box back to some facility in Palo Alto or Tatooine, or something -- rather than returning it to the return address, which was written correctly. (And was the same address as the other address, save the zip code.) Anyway, I didn't have a tracking number, so I had to call the original UPS Store where I sent the package from. I was passed from employee to employee, and was given no satisfaction. I was getting ready to get a little crazy with them until (on the fifth phone transfer, literally) I explained that it wasn't the clothes or the book that I was worried about getting back, I was worried about a half-finished knitting project that I had spent many, many hours on.

And that was all it took. The lady's entire demeanor changed. Suddenly my package was located, re-routed, and back on its way to me.

Apparently just mentioning knitting gets you the goods. Well, that and an additional $25.00 charge. But who's counting?

We Renew Hope in Spring. Right?

In honor of the vernal equinox, I took a boldly optimistic chance and cast on a new sweater. This one is going to be a cardigan (nice), in red (bonus) very cheap acrylic yarn (thrifty).

I am not feeling very attached to this project, so if it comes to no good...I will not be as sad as last time.

No pictures yet -- a single row of knitting is not too exciting, even if it's red.

Keep your fingers crossed. I will probably need all the luck I can get.

Utility Versus Time Invested.

Well, after several successes, I think it's time to report a tragic and crushing failure:
I am ripping out the sweater -- The Sweater, the beast I've been working on for almost a year.

First of all, I really don't believe it's going to fit. I still think, despite my care and my swatch making, that it will be too big in the neckline. I know it fits under the arms (I tried it on), but the neckline was almost off the shoulder. Why I didn't frog it then, I don't know. It was obvious that something was way off, since I only had to do about 2/3 of the required increases for my size. I won't wear a neckline that wide, it's as simple as that. Also, it's a pullover and I don't even own any pullovers -- not a one. I don't wear them. What the hell was I thinking?

The only thing keeping me going was the psychology of previous investment. (If you've never heard the term, look it up.)

In the end, would it be better to have spent endless hours on an ill-fitting and unworn garment? Or to admit defeat and start over with something that will actually be useful to me?

I'm choosing the second path, as awful as it may be. But in the end I will have a nice, soft, climate-suitable cropped cotton cardigan -- that fits.

But I'm still probably going to cry...

Flingable Baby Hat.

Well, my impending cousin has arrived, and everyone knows infants need hats -- and not just for warmth. They also need to fling them off, causing much consternation among their childcare providers and much joy for the babies.

With that in mind, I figure a good baby hat should be soft, durable, washable, and most of all, easily flung. I think the following hat covers all of these bases.

I adapted the Children's Cotton Hat from Last Minute Knitted Gifts. I omitted the eyelets and the i-cord tie, because those were there specifically to prevent flinging. I also slightly altered the number of rounds between decreases to make the hat little less pointy.

Here's how it turned out in Ty-Dy (100% cotton from Knit One Crochet Too):


I love the way to decreases look from the top.


I hope my new cousin gets a lot of good use out of this little hat -- and that he doesn't throw it so well that he loses it!

O! Progress!

Ladies and gentlemen, girls and boys...I have made it to the armpit.

The day I thought would never come has arrived at last. The armpit! The glories of the armpit!

Here's a close-up shot to prove that this is not just a clever Photoshop hoax:

Excuse me, but I have to go sing the "Hallelujah" chorus from Handel's Messiah just now...

The Amazing Slow Motion Sweater.

No one told me that knitting was like heroin, and I really wish someone had because it would have saved me lots of money and time.

I know this is a frequent sort of lament among people who eagerly spend grocery money on fine yarn, but I really thought I was immune. I mean, I thought knitting was purely a recreational drug, since I'd tried it once and didn't get hooked. However, circumstances count. I learned to knit for a play -- "Dancing at Lughnasa," actually -- and once the run ended, I went about eight years before touching a knitting needle again.

But in the winter of 2003, I saw some really soft yarn at Wal-Mart, and I thought, "Maybe that depressing Irish play actually left me with a useful skill (besides a passable brogue accent) -- hmmm, I do need a new winter scarf..." All I knew how to do was the knit stitch, which is really just the knitting equivalent of a gateway drug. Plus, it's all you need to know to make a simple scarf. I bought the yarn, and my fate was sealed.

Being a drama queen, my simple scarf ended up being well over ten feet long -- and took almost a year of stop and start knitting to complete.

It gradually snowballed after that first project. A scarf for a friend here, a simple hat there. It all adds up. But one day I realized that I could in fact read most knitting patterns, and I knew that the time had come to give up the freebasing and start injecting straight into my veins: It was time to knit a sweater.

I bided my time. I passed over easier projects -- tank tops and the like. I waited, looking for the perfect pattern (and learned about felting in the mean time). I finally found a pattern on Knitty that seemed both simple enough but nice enough to wear: Bad Penny. I got some inexpensive yarn, and went to town.

And decided it was waaaaay too big, I hated the texture, and I had spent about twelve hours on a project that would never be finished.

Let's just say that I let the knitting rest for several months at that point. I've been sewing a lot longer than I've been knitting, so it's always my "fall back" craft. My fabric stash grew, while my yarn stash laid dormant.

And then Lion Brand reintroduced Cotton Ease. I had never used the stuff, but I had read lots of online gushing about how it was really great for an inexpensive yarn -- and also nice for the subtropical climate of Houston, where really good wool is useful for about two weeks each January. I took a little field trip to Michael's, and came home with several skeins of light grey cotton blend...and a new resolve to tackle a sweater.

I went back to the original pattern I had chosen, and did a proper circular swatch. I cast on, got started, and five months later...I am one row away from the armpits.

This is the project that simply won't end. For one thing, the monotony of round after round of knitting and increasing, knitting and increasing, knitting and -- you get the idea -- is almost numbingly boring. The only time I made any real progress on the sweater was when it was too hot to go outside and I was watching the first two seasons of "Lost" on DVD. I have sewn a bunch of stuff since I started the darn sweater, but it's like time lapse photography -- or worse, like geological time.

I swear, we will be in a new geological era by the time this sweater is finished. Or maybe I will have gone extinct, and future insect archaeologists will find this perfectly preserved, half-finished sweater and wonder at its significance, placing it in a prominent place in their national museum. Small cockroach children will waggle their antennae at it in wonder, and no will know what it was -- or how it made me go insane.

Okay, I know rationally that it takes a really long time to knit a sweater. I also know that my lack of progress is compounded by both my knitting speed (which is laughingly slow) and the fact that I don't work on it every day. But my conservative estimate is that I have spent around 17 hours working on a single garment -- and I am nowhere near finished.

When I work on the sweater now, I keep singing "This is the sweater that never ends, it just goes on and on, my friend..." in my mind.

But I will finish, oh yes. I will finish! It may have one dropped and two split stitches -- but it will be done!