Startitis, Knitting, Time Management

It's unbelievable how difficult it is for me to work on one project for a full day. Well, not the full day as in 24 hours, but a full day as in 3-5 hours per night, not including an occasional hour in the morning before getting ready for work.

I have a project, a big one, it's a cardigan (picture shows how it is supposed to look) that should be finished by Friday. I started on August 31st, thinking I had lots of time. Well, I happily started knitting the back first. Oh, before I did

that, I measured and measured what size I should make. I decided on the third size on the pattern, which doesn't tell me if it's small, medium, large, x-large, xx-large or what ever. I don't know the sizes in cm without spending oodles of minutes trying to find something suitable to measure. Then they have two measures, the actual size of the person, and the finished size of the garment. Well, this would have been easy to do, the measuring part, if the person knew that I was making the dang cardigan, but it's a surprise, so no measuring while the person is around.

My decision on the third size was not even close to the size I needed. I had about 15 cm excess in width. Arrrrgghhh. I measured the gauge, or tension, as the pattern calls it. The tension was the same, even though my needle size was smaller and the yarn was thinner. Go figure. I decided to

step down on the needle size as well as the pattern size. Smallest size it is. And the measures for the front pieces seem to work just fine. I am so baffled with this, since the person who is supposed to get this cardigan is usually size L or X-L. Maybe people in other parts of the

world measure differently.

Today was the day when I had promised myself to completely finish the front pieces, with my

pattern changes (very normal for me to change something). I also planned to get the back piece up to the armpit decreases. Well, at the moment I still need some 5 cm for the fronts, and the back is now only 10 cm. Not even close to the arm hole part. It's 10 pm and there is no hope in hell to get 30 some cms done by 12 tonight. That was my plan originally, in the morning, before

I went shopping.

First I stopped at the bank to pay some bills, then off to the grocery store. Sure, the grocery store was somewhere to the left on my route, and I just kept going northbound and ended up

in Michaels (arts and crafts). I decided to go in, instead of turning around and took a basket.

I put my handbag into the basket, thinking that if the dang basket was full, I would not buy too

much stuff.

Somehow I steered my feet towards the yarn section. I started checking the sock yarns. It's

amazing how easy it is to buy sock yarn when you really don't need to do it, since there are

two, at least, big plastic tubs, from WalMart, and other stores, full of sock yarns already. Not to mention all the sock yarn that I bought in Finland in July/August, when I was there for two weeks. That is another story.

This is one of the yarn stores I visited in Finland.

I had bought some Kroy sock yarn the other day, two of each color (three colors), and as I was looking at those yarns, I decided that hubby needs socks for Christmas, and the yarns I had bought earlier wasn't enough for nice long socks. I bought one more of two of the colors that I had only bought two. Then I bought three different color skeins for my hubby's socks. Oh, and

another color for myself (haha, I don't even like to wear socks too much, they make my feet warm)

Oh, and Chapters was on the other side of the parking area and I had to go and check the magazines. I think I bought two, have only glanced thru, and then set aside for later reading. I do buy these magazines for the articles, not the patterns. I know I will never make everything anyway, but I love looking at the pictures and reading about new "tools" and other new ideas.

How hard is it to go to a grocery store and buy bread, coffee and eggs? I chose to go to another

grocery store than the one I normally use. What, they had beautiful strawberries, blueberries and gorgeous nectarines. A kind man gave me to taste velvet plum, and that was so delicious that I had to get a few, 6. My total bill, for these few items was way over 100 bucks, I am not going to tell how much, but those were expensive fruits and breads etc. (I think I had other items there, too, but they were not on my list).

At home, it was time to do laundry and clean some floors and do the dishes. Finally I was able to sit down and start on my plan to get the cardigan going. Hah, dream on. I had to see how the new yarn would look on the needles. But hey, first to find a pattern. Not to mention that I have about four sock pattern books. It was much easier to open Ravelry site and start surfing socks made with Kroy yarn. This took several minutes (about 63), and the evil cardigan was staring at me with a shameless smirk. I decided on a basic pattern that I could knit without so much as trying to think what's in line on the next row. Let the yarn do the talking.

Fortunately then my brain started screaming at me and like a good girl I took the cardigan project and started working on that. It's going to be a hard and painful project to finish, because there are so many other projects that I would love to do right now.

Life is hard enough without knitting project dilemmas.

Back to my cardigan project now.