Deadline approaches

One day, my aunt mentioned that she would like to commission me to knit a sweater for her granddaughter. I agreed to do it and I foolishly provided her with a bunch of pattern books to flip through, including one from the 1960s with insanely small-gauged yarns. That highly decreased the likelihood that she would pick a project like "super chunky baby sweater that you can knit in one hour with small tree trunks for knitting needles."

She picked a cute sweater dress with raglan sleeves and a little peter pan collar with eyelet trim on the hem and collar. I bought the yarn and started knitting away. This was February of 2003. I had only completed a few rows when the needle broke!! Ok, I was using cheapo size 3 plastic needles, but I had not even conceived that as a possibility. I despaired. It happened mid-row. These needles were of the cheapo dollar store multipack variety and of slightly different sizes than most normal, commercially available needles. At first I thought that maybe I could somehow resharpen the broken part into a point, so I could keep knitting, but then the same needle broke again. Argh.

After letting the abandoned project stew in the corner for awhile, I got back on track. I got new needles, but since they were a different size, I decided to start over from the beginning. I made some progress and wrote to tell my aunt how it was going. Then she made a fatal mistake. She said not to worry about finishing it by a certain time and made allusions to giving it to my other cousin's baby if its intended recipient got too big.

Another round of marination later, I finally picked the project back up this summer. I was knitting away on it somewhere in Arizona when I realized that the ball of yarn I had bought over a year before was getting alarmingly small. Aggh!! Fortunately, even though it has dyelots, the difference is not apparent. Trust, me, I stared at the yarn for at least a half an hour, draped it over the project, agonized and whined before buying the extra skein. When I started knitting with the new skein, it wasn't noticeable at all. Whew.



It's now almost Thanksgiving. The poor sweater has languished in a box for months waiting for me to seam it up. The edges are all curly and I hope I can block them into submission. I am driving tomorrow night, but I have Wednesday to get this sweater finished in time to pass it off on Thanksgiving, so hopefully the poor child can receive it before it's too small for her.