Good News & Bad Khaki Tragedy

The Good:

In all this crafting excitement, I forgot to share my good news: My work permit arrived in the mail this week!! This means I am now eligible for employment in the U.S., which feels like a major relief. I was starting to get a little restless, so this is just in time. I'm also waiting on one more application that was reviewed this month (for licensure) - hopefully it will be approved as well.

The Bad:

I finally sewed buttons on the Khaki Jacket today and put it on and...well, first I'll show you the nice pictures:

Looks OK, right? It's deceiving. The fit was pretty terrible. Far too drapey, floppy all around the bottom, and saggy at the elbows. Sigh. Very disappointing. I already had a bad feeling about it after I finished the first front panel, but I soldiered through to give it a chance (there's something to be said here about Intuition). After about 15 minutes of wear, it looks like a different beast altogether. I also made several other stupid mistakes with this project. First, I forgot to make button holes, duh. Second, I cleverly decided to graft together the shoulder seams for invisibility, but when do you ever see invisible shoulders on garments? I was clearly not in my right mind. Plus, it added to the frustrating stretchiness of the whole thing.

Lessons learned:

1. Cotton can be heavy and drapey.
2. Getting gauge does not necessarily means it's going to work well with a pattern.
3. Loose gauge means saggy elbows and pulling at the buttons.
4. A structured little A-line jacket with an upright collar needs a denser wool or something to help maintain its shape.
5. Don't forget to make button holes.
6. Don't join shoulders with Kitchener stitch.

I haven't given up on this pattern yet - I'll give it another try in bulky yarn and see how it goes. After seeing the cute ones out in blog land, I still have hope!

I will probably rip it out at some point to turn it into the Hourglass Sweater - it's lovely yarn and doesn't deserve to be left as a bad sweater. 'All those hours of knitting, how can you bear unraveling it?' I've been asked. I think the answer, for me, is that having the failed object lying around feels more intolerable than seeing it converted back into a few balls of nicely wound yarn, with the potential of a fresh start. In fact, I've got a little pile of sweaters now, from when I started knitting, that are going to be recycled. I'll definitely take pictures of them so that I don't forget what my first sweaters were like - and all the amusing mistakes that went along with them.

Crafty Update

Finally, the weekend! This weekend will be especially fun because it happens to be Road Trip #1. A while ago I purchased Neil Zurcher's Ohio Road Trips and have been wanting to do a little exploring. Starting with central-ish (I think) Ohio, we will be visiting the Tuscarawas region and stopping in Sugarcreek, Dover, Bolivar, and whereever else catches our eye. This entire area is also home to Ohio's largest Amish population, and producer of a ton of Swiss cheese. Should be very interesting.

Onto knitticraftiness: It has been a crafty few days so I've got a few photos to share. First off, I made yet another bear from LMKG - they are just so cute. You can never make too many of these. It still needs facial details, but it's almost done. I love its pudgy arms and legs. Gatsby was suspicious at first, but soon converted to a bear-cuddler:


What a helpful photography assistant. I think he's giving me a dirty look.


The jacket is slowly coming along. It has been abandoned many times for smaller, quicker knits, but I managed to start a sleeve...

I also baked a cake on Thursday, but was rather uninspired, and ended up just using the flower candies I had made last time. Actually, this cake went through several disasters including having to remove some ugly hot pink roses from the centre. That's why there is a large mound of purple in the middle - to hide the ugly mistake. The cake was unfortunately a bit of a mess on the inside (I broke both layers) too, so hopefully the taste makes up for the interior ugliness. It's a nice bright lemony cake inside...yum!

And I finished the crown of the Koolhaus Hat:

Have a good weekend!

Knitting away...

It's been a beautiful weekend here in Columbus. I love that it's perfect sweater weather right now. Fall is my favourite for colours too - you can wear more grey, black, browns and dark blue without being accused of being depressing.

D and I have been enjoying the local arts scene - we heard the Columbus Symphony perform Beethoven's 9th symphony (chorale) on Friday night. I haven't been to all that many symphonies, but I thought it was amazing. The conductor was so enthusiastic I thought he would fall off his podium at several points. The Ohio Theatre itself is a gorgeous old venue that's really worth a visit. Afterward, we went to the Elevator Brewery & Restaurant for drinks - also a great spot to check out. It's huge inside - you'd never guess looking in from the street.

Saturday was shopping day, which I always enjoy because of the new observations to be made about food products and how they're different from Toronto (e.g. enormous selection of instant potato products - including instant mashed sweet potatoes - as well as an entire aisle of frozen french fries and pizza). D enjoyed browsing the wine aisle and found a bottle of Ruffino Chianto for $7, which is usually sold for about $14 in Toronto. Yes, alcohol is cheap here. Good for hosting parties.

Inbetween all our socializing and errand running, I have managed to make progress on the khaki jacket. The back and right front piece are done, and I'm just staring the left front panel. I'm a bit worried about the amount of flare at the bottom - hopefully it won't be too floppy once it's seamed up. The other problem I noticed is that the double moss stitches seemed to be a tighter gauge than the stockinette portion (I was probably pulling too much) but maybe it will even out after blocking. I have seen some really nice versions out there like this one and this one - seeing theirs is a good kick in motivating me to hurry up on mine.

I also started another pair of socks...they will be more Monkeys: