Weekend Knitting Mayhem (or Why I Should Follow My Own Directives)

Today I:

• had plain bagel with Tofutti "cream cheese" and nutritional yeast
• drank a cup of organic Fair Trade coffee with vanilla soy milk
• made myself a soy latte at work
• reverted to bruchetta pizza and Kettle chips for lunch
• had yet another coffee... from a box of coffee...

Whereas, yesterday I:

• had an egg salad sandwich and a large latte for breakfast
• had the last of the vegetable-noodle soup for dinner
• ripped out close to 3,000 stitches
• finished it all off with a beer and a hot buttered rum, and really, who could blame me?

Saturday began innocuously enough: I slept in, had soy lattes with Joe at his work, then made my weekly sacrifice to Windsor Button, and settled in at a coffeehouse to start a hat for my dad for X-mas.

Originally, my dad's hat was going to be Fair Isle. Then, what with the holiday knitting taking so long (I have 8 or 9 siblings), and my mom's socks being such a challenge (why didn't I just stockinette stitch some self-striping yarn? What was I thinking doing an openwork design?) I decided it might be prudent to nix that program and just make something classic and functional, like a seaman's hat. I found a good pattern, bought some black Lion Wool (cheap person that I am) and set to it. Two and half hours of coffee-drinking and some nachos and a couple DVDs later I had a hat. So easy! I just followed the instructions and all the faults were mine. (Luckily, they're minor.)

Side View

This hat is not purple - it's BLACK. It is very difficult to photograph black F.O.s at night in and dinky little apartment, especially when your model is determined to make monkey faces. I managed to edit most of that out, but I can do nothing whatsoever about the color.

Front View

I am rather pleased with the Seaman's Hat. I was going to make the Marsan Watchcap, (such a nice spiral decrease!) but in the photos it looked perhaps a little too loosely knit. My dad works in building maintenance and needs something suitable for wear in extremely foggy/damp weather. This seaman's hat pattern looked snugly knit, and as it turns out, has some very nice details, such as a continuation of the cuff ribbing on the underside and m1 twisted increases. I think I am going to make more, even though that may mean bestowing gifts upon those outside of the nuclear family. Maybe Bob. (Bob recently reported actually enjoying the fingerless gloves I mailed him.)

Which brings me to the serious act of frogging that was committed last tonight, grinding all knitting for the evening to a tragic halt.

It's the fingerless gloves with the mitten flip-tops that I'm making for Sibling #8. I started with the Broad Street Mittens from Knitty, but certain untoward reports about the shaping of the palm led me to actually seeing a couple pairs of them in person, confirming my growing suspicion of the pattern. I had learned (or so I thought) from making those fingerless gloves from Rowan #36 that I could not trust glove patterns to be sized properly - gloves that were supposed to fit the average-sized female hand, and were slightly downsized by me, are now being enjoyed by an averaged-sized man with notably wide palms.

What to do?

Well, after vowing to never faithfully follow a pattern again, I used the Knitting Fiend glove pattern generator to make my own. (I can trust the Knitting Fiend, right?)

As it turns out, not really. I entered my gauge, selected hand type "small", then printed out the directions and followed them. Nearly faithfully. This is what I had when it came time to make the fingers. Now, I know this is a blurry photograph, but I bet you an still see my problem quite clearly: THIS GLOVE IS FAR TOO BIG.

The gauge was correct. The problem, I surmise, is the idea of "small". Apparently, I am "extra small". Possibly even "extra extra small" or "itsy-bitsy".

I frogged down to the cuff and wrote home to Sibling #8 asking for exact measurements of her hands. I'll just start it from scratch. Again.