Yet more booties

I really don’t want to bore my tiny audience of readers by constantly showing the same project rendered in a different color, but the past week dictated small, portable, mindless projects so you will need to suffer through yet another pair of booties. These are the ones I started during jury duty on Monday:

Pattern: own
Yarn: South West Trading Company Tofutsies; 50% superwash wool, 25% Soysilk fibers, 22.5% cotton, 2.5% chitin
Needles: size 2
Size: newborn to 6 months

The colors pooled a little at the tops but I find the way the colors are blended makes interestingly variegated pools.

I got back to working on the green fuzzy sweater I began in late January. I let it languish for a few weeks for two reasons.

(1) I was neurotically obsessed with making baby items when I heard we are going to have two new babies in the family. Now that I’ve come to my senses and realized I have months to go (and have made 3 baby sweaters already), I am back to working on the WIP pile.

(2) I had to do sleeve calculations and for some reason any step requiring calculations causes me to think yick and throw a project aside. It makes no sense. I am not afraid of math; got the Math Award in high school, even. I think it’s more a fear of making something not fit and having it be my fault. If someone else (as in a published pattern) has done the math then I can’t go wrong, right? The calculations took all of 5 minutes one evening and I started my sleeves.

The barely-visible-in-this-photo white threads you see where the sleeves begin are my lifelines, in case I need to rip back:

And I am very glad I put them in, as I have used the right one twice already. I finished the right sleeve a few weeks ago… after knitting and frogging it twice. On the first go I picked up the stitches and knitted away, cursing how hard it was. After at least 90 painfully slow minutes, I noticed the stitches were rather a lot smaller than they were in the sweater body. Yep, I used a smaller needle to pick up the stitches and forgot to switch to larger ones on the next row. Rrrrrip.

Second go, I knitted down to the end of the skein and thought, “wow, that sleeve sure is narrow.” I had calculated that I needed to decrease 20 stitches total, so 2 stitches every 10 rounds. Somehow my brain converted that to “1 stitch every 10 rounds, but I’m decreasing 2 each time so 2 stitches every 5 rounds” even though on the paper in front of me I had it written down correctly. What a doofus. Rrrrrip again. If it weren’t so long ago, those Math Award people might show up on the doorstep and strip me of that honor.

Last night I managed to bring the left sleeve down to the length of the right one without mishap. Whew! Perhaps I do have the minimum amount of intelligence required to knit. Right now the sweater is hanging on a chair so those sleeves can grow all they want before I put in the last couple of inches. Berroco Memoirs is such a light yarn that the swatch did not stretch but past experience with mohair means I don’t trust this yarn not to grow once it’s worked up in sweater size.