ssetnuoC = Countess

I'm writing from home on my home laptop. Unfortunately, all of my photos are on my work laptop. At work. So if you're reading between NOW and oh, about 7:30 am PT on Tuesday, you'll just have to bear with the spacers that will become photos when I edit the post in the morning.

Yesterday (Sunday) was a so-so knitting day. Got up, got a little organized, got showered and went over to Beach Knitting. Love that place! :) As you may remember me saying, after last week's fun over at BK, I came home and F'd up every single project I touched.

The sleeve of my purple V-neck sweater? Odd number of stitches, which means I missed an increase somewhere. Irma, my favorite knitting magician, helped me fix that pretty easily.

I hadn't F'd up my alpaca sleeve #1, so here's a nice boring progress photo. Sorry I didn't realize until just now how bad the color looks on this. It's still that peacock-turquoise, it's just really blown out in this pic.



EDITOR'S NOTE: I'm trying really hard to dress like a grown-up and look a lot more business-like at my office. this would be MUCH easier if the air conditioning (yes, I said air conditioning while we're in No-freakin-vember) in my office building wasn't set for about 50 degrees. I know I collect penguins, but I didn't know I needed to BE part penguin to work in my office without turning into a human popsicle. I gotta finish my alpaca cable and my purple wool V-neck so I don't freeze to death in the office every day.

Then there's my beautiful Countess. When I went to BK last Sunday, I thought I was in decent shape, but then eight rows after I split the V on the neck, Houston we had a problem. 39 stitches on one side, 41 on the other. Ruh-roh, Shaggy! Here's a photo of Countess as it looked when I walked in to BK yesterday morning



First, Irma waved her magic wand and tinked back to the split on the right front of the sweater, 'cause I had obviously missed a neck decrease on that side. I got back to work. At this point, my brain was starting to melt. But I perservered. Re-knit the right front to match the left front. Counted again. SHAZBOT! So I took a deep breath and we decided to rip back to the split for the neck. Ripped. Picked up. Counted. 80 stitches. I started with 78, side shaped down to 70, then side shaped back up to 78. In theory at least. SHAZBOT! (this was the first time I shouted the F-word in the store. All friends in da house at this point).

Took a close look at the sides, as Irma joked that I was gonna have to rip the whole thing. Within 5 minutes, I knew that while she was intending to joke, she was absolutely right. I had missed the first three of the four decreases on the right side of the front. No wonder I was fat after the split and had an uneven number of stitches on each side. Would have yelled the F-word again, but there were people I didn't know in the store, so I just grumbled a lot and took the sweater into the back to use the winder to frog the damn thing.

So now it's sitting on a small needle at the end of the 2x2 rib waiting for me to be willing to pick it up again. I will, because I love this yarn and love this pattern, but it's frustrating as hell to have to re-knit this thing. But I'd damn well better pay attention when I pick this thing up again, and not just paying attention to the cable! Here's a current shot, as of 6 am Tuesday:


It's now 7:30, I got home in a reasonable amount of time, cooked up some yummy dinner (pasta with meat sauce) and cracked open what's left of the white wine my mom left behind. No Countess for me tonight. Haven't decided what I'm gonna do yet. Could read, could sock or could Fuzzy Foot. I really want to embroider some quilting labels, but that's more set-up and general work than I'm up for tonight. We shall see.