Where are they now?

Here it is day four of the 2nd annual knitting and crochet blog week and I'm only now managing to get a post up. Alas. It shouldn't come as a surprise that I have several knitting projects that never made it out of the embryo stage. Right now on needles I've got a shrug that's 80% done, started back when it was warm enough that I altered the pattern to be short sleeved! And soon it will be warm enough again to wear it. It's sitting near a shawl that barely got started (okay I started it about a dozen times, and am seriously considering frogging it yet again, because it's still not coming out quite right).

Beside that is a hat that a friend describes as my evil minion hat. It's black and purple lace in a bulky yarn that I knit to match a lovely, long, skinny scarf. The lace patter makes a nice scalloped edge, one that I thought would look good at the edge of a hat. And it might if it weren't a skullcap hat. If I wear it so that the lowest point of the scallops are right over my eyebrows, it resembles a pointless dunce cap. If I wear it with a scallop in the middle of my forehead, it's vaguely reminiscent of Ming the Merciless's skullcap. Or maybe one of the Ming minions, I don't know. Suffice it to say, it's not flattering. I have more of the purple and can add to it, give it a clean edge, filing in the scalloped bits. You know, if I knew how to do that kind of pick up knitting.

But the piece de resistance of my 'I'll finish it! No, really! Someday..." collection has to be the first sweater I tried to make. I barely knew how to read patterns when I started it, really shouldn't have even attempted a sweater at that stage, but I did. It's done in sections and not the typical sections. First there was a long, complicated band, only 22 stitches across (heavy worsted weight yarn).. I love the pattern in the band. If I'd chosen any other color but black, it'd look great. In black, it looks black. See what I mean about attempting such a thing too soon?

Once the band was done, it was stockingnet forever. Increases every tenth row meant I couldn't quite sleepwalk (sleep knit?) through it but it was a near thing. Unlike the ladies of my Wednesday night beer and knitting group, I couldn't knit in dark places like bars or movie theaters, being too new to knitting and with black yarn too likely to drop a stitch or seven. I plucked away at it as long as I could, right up until it got too warm out for me to be willing to carry around what amounted to a wool blanket.

Just last month I pulled that one out of its project bag and finished the section I was working on, from the band down to the bottom edge; the miles of uninteresting stockingnet are done! And now I face a dilemma.

Being very much the novice knitter when I started the black sweater, I neglected to measure myself correctly, and of course I didn't understand how important swatching could be. I picked what I thought was my size (coincidentally the largest for which they gave stitch counts) and started knitting. The problem became apparent even before I finished the band, but I figured it was about right. There's supposed to be some overlapping of sweater sides, right? It's not like the thing has buttonholes!

The sizing is so far off, It's more than double breasted. The dilemma I face is how to deal with the mis-sizing. I don't want to frog it, no way; I've come too far! Those miles of stockingnet! So I have to figure out where the armholes should go, to knit the top of the sweater. Do I make it a very deep double breasted sweater? Or do I just make it too big? Both have merits. A large, comfy sweater in black wool would be nice in the office right around now. I'm freezing every day! And will likely continue to do so once the weather changes and the AC starts really coming up.

Or maybe I should try to find that wool shawl I started in the gorgeous fall colors. It'd look pretty over the back of my chair, the colors would really pop. And I could wear it over my knees when it gets really cold, using my current office sweater to keep my upper body warm. Yeah, that sounds like a plan. If only I could find it. I know it was packed when I moved from my old place to this one. A year ago...