KnittyGritty
I finally finished the front and back halves of the sleeveless sweater (is that a sweater vest? The thing you wear over a button-down shirt?) I promised Stefan for his birthday (2 years ago, but who's counting...). I've knitted this damn thing once, but it ended up huge. I don't know what I was thinking, but as you spend more and more hours going cross-eyed and getting cramps in your hands from the skinny little needles, you start to develop "knitter's denial". Version one of the sweater was in two halves as well. Which matched. And why didn't I stop knitting after seeing just how huge the first half had turned out? Knitter's denial, that's why. I convinced myself that it would somehow work out, that it wouldn't matter if the sweater was a little long, etc. So I knitted the entire second half before the painful reality finally managed to break through and reduce me to tears and yelling at no one in particular.
This time around, I obsessively measured as I was going. The back is about an inch longer than the front, but that's because of the patterning (kinda argyle-esque), which makes the front contract a little. The back is plain. Looks good. When I washed the halves and pinned them to dry in shape, I noticed a mistake in the argyle pattern (of course) right by the tip of the neckline. So I had to rip that one side of the neckline back to the beginning and re-do it. I couldn't just drop the stitches and work them back up in the right pattern because the mistake was just below the first decrease for the neckline.
Anyway, that reworked part is drying as I type this (typing at work, it's been slow since Christmas). All I have to do now is sew the front and back together and add the finishing to the neckline and armholes. I'm going to try picking up stitches and knitting the ribbing straight onto the body rather than knitting a strip and sewing it on. I've never done this before, but I know how it's supposed to work. I predict tears ahead, but you gotta learn sometime.
I have a lot of projects in mind now that I've discovered Knitty.com. I don't have the yarn for them yet though. My next project: crocheted sausages to hang across the door jamb to keep the door from accidentally closing and locking the cat in or out of somewhere. This happened once already: Kürbis knocked a clothes rack over, which fell against the door, locking him in our bedroom for the whole day. When we came home, he had peed right in the middle of the bed. Of course, you can't really blame him, can you, but right in the middle? It soaked through the quilt into the summer blankets underneath (we each have one, they overlap in the middle of course), etc. Needless to say, we don't want any repeats of that, so now we leave shoes against the door frame to keep the door open. That's not ideal either, though, since Kürbis'll often tear through the house for no apparent reason and knock those shoes out of the way. So I've designed these sausages that I'll hang across the jamb sort of at eye level, from a hook on either side of the wall. It's a good way of using up crappy unwanted yarn, too. And if you want to close the door, you can just unhook one end of the sausage. The prototype is nearly finished, I'll take pictures.
Work has been a little slow lately, nobody is buying anything which means we aren't selling anything, which mean I'm not translating anything. It's boring sitting around all day pretending to be busy. We aren't allowed to surf the internet outside of break, so I'm limited to whatever webpages I can justify as relating to my job (including engrish.com, urbandictionary.com, and the leo forums). Other than that, it's Sudoku and web content I've copied into Word during break interspersed with a few jobs here and there. I keep telling myself, though, that I'm lucky to be employed and not a freelancer, because I get paid for attendance, essentially, whereas a freelancer would only get paid for doing work, of which there isn't any. So our motto here in the office is: keep your head down, look busy and hang onto your job.