Thanks, guys!

In response to my concern that I might not have enough yarn for DD2's Mythos cardigan, Keja wrote and offered her leftovers of the same colourway. That's so nice of you, thank you! :) But fortunately, I don't need it:

(if you're wondering why she looks like she doesn't have legs, she does - she's just wearing light pink tights which kind of vanish against the white cabinetry)

Made it by the skin of my teeth - I had a little bit left over, maybe a couple of yards. I then realised later, after I'd thrown all the end bits out, that I'd forgotten to sew the garter stitch selvedge. But DD2 and I decided that it didn't matter, the cardigan looked fine without that:

Here it is lying flat:

Now I just need to find her some kind of pretty pin to close it up with. It'll be great for the fall when she goes back to school!

I also want to thank everyone who commented offering suggestions as to how I could finish off DD3's Secret Garden cardigan without having to rip everything back. I am still in the denial/avoidance phase, so I haven't given any of the suggestions serious thought yet, but when I get over myself and get back to the project, I definitely will!

On a finishing kick

I just wrapped up a magazine sample project. As usual with these things, I can't spill any meaningful beans, but I don't think it'd be beyond the pale to say that it's another print magazine, which is exciting! The issue won't be coming out for a goodly while, but of course I will make an announcement here when it does. Now I just have to finalize all the written stuff and send off a package to the editor.

And I recently got another acceptance, which thrilled me all to pieces. So far with my 12-in-12 challenge (which I've done 5 of so far) I'm running a 75% acceptance rate for stuff I've heard back from, which I think is pretty excellent! But the new acceptance meant I needed to finish up the sample I'd been working on so that I could photograph it, so I did that today - it just needed some ends woven in.

And as long as I was sewing, I thought I might as well break out the "Miss Dashwood" hat I started working on for DD3 last year. It just needed the earflaps and ties sewn on and the ends woven in, so I did just that:

hat:




inside of hat showing the flaps:




inside of the hat with the flaps buttoned up out of the way:




hat modelled by a tired and messy-faced DD3:

I also took more steps towards finishing DD2's "Mythos" cardigan (second attempt). I ran out of yarn as I was approaching the end of the second half, but this wasn't a big deal because, once again, I'd made the sleeves too long. So I cut each sleeve open, unravelled a bunch of rows, and grafted them back together again. Then I grafted the two halves together at the back. And then I blocked it:

Sadly, I'm not remotely done yet. Not only are there a lot of ends to weave in, but I have to sew seams, fold a garter stitch selvedge under and sew it down, and do a bunch of icord (which I may run out of yarn for, aiee). So we'll just have to see how that goes. I may have to do the icord edging in a different colour. Meh, if it happens, it happens. I've got lots of black sock yarn that will look nice as an edge.

No luck finding that mythical thirteenth ball of yarn for DH's Durrow sweater - it's not at my parents' place, it wasn't left at Lettuce Knit, and it didn't roll under my seat in the car. I have gone around the house trying to find all the ball bands, on the theory that if I find all thirteen, I obviously used up all thirteen balls of yarn. Alas, I have only found eleven, so that's desperately inconclusive. So I'm very close to deciding to rip both sleeves back almost to the cast-on and do them again shorter. HOPEFULLY that will do the trick.

I'm trying to get as much done as possible because I've got deadlines popping up all over the place. Most of the deadlines are for proposals that I want to get in, but I do have another sample to do in the next month or so for which, hopefully, the yarn support will be arriving soon. In fact, I should head off now to check the mail again!

Traction: I don't haz it

At the end of May, I blogged that I'd realised I had sixty WIPs kicking around the house, assuming I finished DH's birthday socks and DD2's cardigan. Well, as already seen, I finished those socks; and recently, I finished the cardigan:

(As predicted, it fits DD1, not DD2.)

Plus I've finished some more items besides, and I now find myself with...sixty-two WIPs.

Oh dear.

And I thought I was doing so well.

I mean, seriously - in the last three months or so, I've finished a cardigan, a pair of Pemberley Slippers, three glitzy scarves, a felted purse, two pairs of socks, three cupcakes, a blanket, a vest, two prototypes of which I cannot speak, and a tank top. That's not shabby! And yet, I am further behind on my WIP count than when I started.

(Yes, I am perfectly aware that the reason for this is that many of those finished projects were also new projects on top of the monstrous pile of WIPs I already had. Someday, Mia Michaels will choreograph an emotionally gripping piece about the compelling, seductive power of Startitis and its hapless knitter victim, and then everyone will understand how this could happen to me.)

But goshdarnit, I am determined to make some inroads on that huge total. It isn't, however, going well.

• Although I'm over halfway through my latest prototype, I realised that I need to totally re-jig a part of it, which means ripping and redoing.
  
• I was making excellent progress on DH's Durrow sweater, and then ran out of yarn. This seemed odd, since I thought I had slightly overbought just to be absolutely sure, which makes me think that maybe I am missing one ball? (Unfortunately, I wasn't really keeping track as I went.) So I'm going to call my mom and ask if maybe a ball rolled out of my bag at her place. And lordy, I hope it did, because the alternative is to rip back both almost-done sleeves and redo them a little shorter. (This will fortunately not affect the fit since the sleeves ended up longer than they were supposed to be, which is one reason why I think that the last ball of yarn hasn't gone missing at all but is rather part of the sweater already.)
  
• I want to finish off all the making-up on my dad's Morgan hat but still haven't gotten around to it.
  
• I got DD2 to try on the Mythos cardigan I started for her about two years ago to see just how badly she's outgrown it. The answer: not too badly, but considering she'll probably be wearing it this fall, it needed to be bigger. So last night I ripped it out and started again, with bigger needles. I should have enough yarn even with the size increase, because the original version had sleeves which were mondo long on her. (Famous. Last. Words.)
  
• Oh, and I started a new design prototype.
  

Moreover, yarn support (times two) should be arriving soon, and I'll have to dump everything for those. (But believe me, I'm NOT complaining about that! :)

Dork remix

So you see this here needle, do ya see it?

Anything look a little "off" to you about that needle tip? No? What if I put it next to its twin and showed you again? (Keeping in mind that both needles were aligned at their bottom ends when this photograph was taken.)

Yeah. I'm sure you see it now.

That is the pair of 3.5mm Brittany needles I was using to make my younger daughter's "Mythos" cardigan. At least 14" long, plus long, fancy heads, they barely fit lengthwise into my knapsack, and on Friday evening as my commute ended and I packed up my knitting, I wasn't too careful about jamming them as far down to the bottom of the bag as they could go, and they ended up peeking up out of their compartment. I must have whacked my bag on something between there and home, and I guess the tip of one needle snapped right off, resulting in the painful visuals you see here. (Literally painful, too - I poked myself on the broken tip this morning as I went to pull the project out of the bag.)

(Yes, I know that Brittany has a we-will-replace-your-needles-at-no-charge guarantee. However, firstly, that's a five-year guarantee and I'm not sure it's been less than five years since the needles were bought; and secondly, I would not feel ethical demanding that they replace a needle - thus costing them money - when it broke because of something stupid I did.)

Okay, so, no big deal, I've got a big needle collection, right? Mourn the Brittanys and move on - just switch to different 3.5mm needles. Unfortunately, thanks to my handy-dandy electronic caliper, I know that the Brittanys are about .11mm smaller than all the other 3.5mm needles I own, which could easily affect my gauge and make the rest of the cardigan look weird, not to mention that I was already freaked out about maybe running out of yarn and slightly bigger needles are certainly not going to help that problem.

Solution? I held up the broken needle with a glum expression on my face to DH. "Oh, no!" he exclaimed. I asked if there wasn't some tool in the workshop we could use to clip off the sharp bit, and then file/sand the tip down to a nice, smooth, knit-with-able point? He didn't seem confident (which floored me - I mean, it seemed like a really simple task to me; if I knew where he kept all the damn tools, I'd go down and have at it myself), but he headed down to the basement and ten minutes later came back with this:

At some point I'm going to have to take a file or some sandpaper (or hell, maybe just an emory board) to the broken needle to make the tip thinner, longer and less stubbly, but it totally functions as a needle again. (We will please ignore the awkwardness of having one needle about four inches shorter than the other.) So I was able to complete the knitting on DD2's cardigan. Miraculously, the yarn held out. I mean, really held out, to the point that I don't even need to cannibalize the sleeves to have enough for the i-cord to finish off the fronts. Here it is clipped together to look vaguely like a garment:

I tried it on DD2 and, alas, the sleeves are monstrously too long, they're going to be huge even when I do surgically remove the 20 rows of no shaping from each sleeve. However, I can roll those up, she is going to grow, and screw it, the cardigan looks fantastic on her, I'm thrilled even with the sleeve length issue.

So I'm a dork

Thanks so much everyone, for your compliments and congratulations on my latest patterns! Unfortunately, it turns out that there is an error in the legend for the Celtic Triad sock pattern, which a knitter very kindly pointed out to me. When writing the pattern, I was extremely careful about my cable instruction descriptions, and double-checked them more times than I can remember...and I still managed to mess one of them up. :( Le sigh. My apologies.

Here are the details: In the legend, 8th symbol from the top (i.e. the 2nd cable symbol), the instructions given for the WS are wrong. They should read "Slip next st to cn" instead of "Slip next 2 sts to cn". If you're actually doing the cable and following the instructions precisely, you would realise (as you went to work the sts from the cable needle after slipping them back on to the left-hand needle) that something was wrong somewhere, but now you know exactly what that wrong bit is. Hopefully this won't trip up too many people. I've already sent a correction to the editors of Knitty and I'm sure the fix will be up soon.

Speaking of Knitty...

I've had three skeins of Garnstudio DROPS Fabel sock yarn, colour #677, kicking around for quite some time. Two of the skeins were an anniversary present from DH, and the third I bought for myself a bit later. I'm sure DH meant them to be for socks, but I had something else in mind: a cardigan for my younger daughter. The colours of the yarn are fantastic - all rich, vibrant greens and blues with some darker and lighter bits thrown in here and there - and they would look fabulous on DD2. I had vague ideas of improvising something top-down, but was never really happy with the idea of having horizontal stripes, so I put it off.

Enter Mythos. At first, when I saw it, I thought, 'meh', but after a while the idea really sank in and I realised that this could be the pattern to use for my daughter's hypothetical cardigan. I worked out The Math, and to fit my kid, the finished product needs to be about 30% smaller than the given finished measurements for the XS size. So I thought, what the heck, let's just go down 30% in needle size and see if that works. (Pattern calls for 5mms, so I broke out some 3.5mms.) No swatching, no testing, just cast on and go. It was a risk.

So far, it's working out rather well, I adore the yarn, and really like how it's all looking. Unfortunately, I think there is a serious risk that I might run out of yarn. However, I'm hoping like heck that I can get around this problem by getting rid of the 20 rows of no shaping on each sleeve. (I've draped the first half of the cardigan over DD2 - which looked FANTASTIC - and the sleeves look much too long.) But we'll see.

Also? I realised this week that the pregnant co-worker of mine is probably going to have some kind of office party thrown for her really soon, and, DUH, I should really make something...

(Sorry about the blurriness; I took the picture at night with no natural daylight streaming into the house, and I suck at holding the camera steady during lengthy exposures. I hate the look of knitting in flash photography, so that isn't an option, either.)

This is a very cute pattern: "Blue Steps - Baby Booties" by Regina Willer. It looks pretty silly lying flat, but the pictures of the booties on actual little feet demonstrate that in use, they are absolutely adorable. I used sock-weight yarn and had both booties all done with just a few hours of work.

I'm hoping to make at least one more pair of footwear for my co-worker, but I think this is a good start.