Starting over

Sometimes, it just isn't working the way you're doing it. And sometimes, a lot of things just aren't working the way you're doing them.

For example, in my last blog post, I mentioned that I would probably be ripping out DD2's butterfly shrug and starting again, because I was running out of purple yarn. My plan was to use flourescent yellow for contrasting bits to get the purple yarn to go farther. And that is indeed what I did. It was a massive pain in the butt to do the back all over again, I don't mind saying, because the three-dimensional butterfly construction is achieved through a heck of a lot of wrapping of stitches, which I just don't find fun. But the good news is, I'm much more pleased with the result. Here's the back of the shrug plus the beginning of one of the front butterflies:

I like it very much, actually.

The bad news (aside from the fact that all those ends might kill me) is that I'm still running out of purple yarn. Oh, well. Hopefully they have more at my local Michaels where I originally bought it. (We will not discuss what I shall do if they don't.)

I also made excellent progress on DD2's teacher's gift - the Musica fingerless gloves. I cast on for them very shortly after my last blog post, and had almost finished the second one...when I ran out of black yarn. (It was left over from another project; I was hoping the leftovers were enough for the gloves. Guess not.) Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it), I was super-close to being able to finish the second glove when the black pooped out on me. So all I had to do was make the cuff ribbing three rounds shorter, and I would have enough black to do both gloves. Of course, this meant ripping back both gloves and doing them all over again. Oh, well. I wasn't happy with how my original thumb gusset increases looked, anyway. Also, it's a fast knit. They're now all done except for the blocking:

And finally, I made the decision that I was going to frog DD3's Lady Emmeline cardigan. You may remember it:

The problem here was that the two colours I was using just weren't contrasting well enough because one of the colours in the variegating yellow yarn was exactly the same colour as the solid butternut it was supposed to be contrasting with. Hence, contrast in some places, but not in others. I thought if I worked on it long enough it would stop being annoying and start becoming an "interesting colourway choice", but eventually I had to get out of denial and choose a different colour combination. After much frogging (fortunately I had been nervous enough about the bad colour contrasting that I had avoided actually cutting any of the yarn after the various bind-offs, so it was still all in one piece), I restarted, using the same butternut as before for my main colour, and some of my new pumpkin-coloured sock yarn as the contrasting colour. I think it's looking fabulous:

It's fairly annoying having to re-do so much knitting, but at least I have good knitting speed to make up for my dumbass decisions...