Switch Hitting

By declaring myself finished after only the short program, "Dainty Bess" is done, a day before the Olympic deadline. Here is what I ended up with. For everyone who nicely told me that you couldn't really see the errors earlier, thank you. Don't bother with it again! You can't see them unless it's spread out, and I plan to never do that to this bit of knitting again. I actually took an "artistically draped in the window" picture, but the errors were even more glaring in that, so no go for the blog.

While I'm taking a few minutes to savor the good things (being done), I realize that it wasn't what I'd hoped I would get out of the event.

I had hoped that I would enjoy doing lace, and I did. That was good. I hoped to demystify charted lace, and to an extent, it was. I had hoped to have a gift-worthy scarf at the end of the project, and I don't.

I do have a teeny weeny neck ring, just enough to tuck into a jacket. It will fit perfectly into a pocket for storage, which is a plus. The baby seems to approve.

It's already been co-opted (along with my orange cotton sweater) by Thing 1. I hear that this sort of thing only happens more and more often. If I could actually make a whole scarf, I'd probably never see it.


But it got kind of lonely, wandering around the Virtual Village with just my jazzy little neck ring for company, even after weaving in the ends. So I kind of entered another event. I don't think that walk-ons are allowed in the "real" Olympics -- a digression: I think the KOs were/are much more real. They were certainly more enjoyable, especially given NBC's hideous coverage stateside -- but if walk-ons were allowed, wouldn't it be fun if, say, bobsledders could go and try ice dancing? This was a pure sprint, one I'm calling either "Baby, It's Cold Inside," or "Whaddya Mean There's No More Yarn/Contrast Color Cuff Baby Sweater."


Right now, it's being blocked. Just like the sweater I made using just too much the rest of this yarn, I knew it would lengthen to the perfect baby-torso sweater. I've been wanting to roughly use the top-down raglan calculator from Woolworks as a starting point for an open-shoulder baby pullover. So this one has (it's hard to see in the picture) a partially open raglan seam, so the humongous baby head can fit through. Then I used my version of single crochet to go around the opening and made a little loop, through which I put an i-cord bobble I made and sewed on. No button searching -- I was up against a deadline. Fortunately I had plenty of the body yarn from the earlier sweater, so one cuff is blue.

This sweater took from some time Friday, with intermittent knitting until today, Sunday. I'm pleased, because our house is incredibly cold, after a brief unseasonable warm spell, and the little baby needs a sweater that fits. And is wool. Now she has one, and I can hold my knitting head up high.

Until I decide what the next lace project is.