Not enough swear words in the universe

Carnival Coat for DD

I am furious at myself. Let me explain. When I first cast on 37 stitches for the skirt as per the instructions, I looked at how wide that was and didn't think it would be big enough to balance out the rest of the cardigan (the skirt is worked perpendicular to the yoke, so the number of stitches you cast on affects the height of the skirt). I held the stitches up the cardigan and thought, yep, way too small. So I cast on another 6 stitches to match the next size up...still a bit small. So finally I cast on another 7 stitches for a total of 50, and it looked good, so I really got going on the skirt. Then, 106 rows into it, the first ball of pink/blue tweed ran out. "Hm," thought I, "I only have one ball of the pink/blue tweed left; I may run out of yarn before I finish." So I did the smart thing - instead of continuing to knit with blind faith that it would all work out, I figured out how many stitches I'd gotten out of the first ball to see if I had enough in the second ball to complete all 15,000 stitches in the skirt plus the extra 300 stitches needed for the graft to the yoke. Turns out I got about 8690 stitches in the first skein. So, 8690 stitches times two balls equals 17,380 stitches - yeah! More than enough for the 15,000 stitches in the skirt! So I kept going. Do you see my mistake? My bonehead, lost-my-mind, threw-the-logic-out-of-the-window mistake? I only figured out what I'd done wrong this morning. I shouldn't have doubled 8690, I should have added 8690 to the 5300 stitches I'd already done on the skirt to see if I had enough. Since 8690 + 5300 is 13,990, the answer was, of course, no. I ran out of yarn 550 stitches from completion of the cardigan last night while watching the Oscars. I am now going to have to rip out all 14,700 stitches of the skirt (*sob*) and do the whole damn thing over again with a slightly shorter skirt. I am so mad. And it is so my fault. Dumber. Than. Sand. Or, in the immortal words of Kirsty Alley, "I am too stupid to live." Sigh.

Itchy-and-Scratchy mittens for baby MacDonald

Mitten #1 is complete. I think it looks great!

As you can see, I went ahead with Scratchy even though I didn't have a really dark grey. I realised that I'd seen pictures of Scratchy in all kinds of different shades - sometimes he's practically black, sometimes he's pretty light grey. So I ditched the idea of mooching off my dad's floss stash, I went ahead and used the darkest grey in my own collection - DMC #414. It worked well. If you're wondering where I got the Scratchy pattern, it's kind of clever, if I do say so myself (not clever enough to make up for my Carnival Coat blunder, but still). I searched on the Internet for Simpsons icons and found a .zip file loaded with icons - headshots of just about every Simpsons character there's ever been, including Itchy and Scratchy. I then got myself an icon editor so I could view the Itchy and Scratchy icons at a high zoom level, and used that as the pattern. I think it worked really well. I can't wait to finish mitten #2 so I can embroider the Itchy pattern.