Thursday, March 03, 2016

Lost days

I'm not even sure what to say happened out there in the last waning days of the shortest month of the year. Something did though.

I could come up with a ton of excuses and some of them would be pretty entertaining, but instead let's focus on what did actually happen since Feb 15th when I last wrote.

First, things picked up at my "real" job. The one I have regular hours for. The one that means I help organize a major fundraiser (for the library) three times a year. So I marked the whole week off from the "freelance job and settled in to get some serious stuff done. Instead the world laughed at me and I spent that week in meetings at school (just normal parent ones not anything huge or individualized) and fighting with my printer at work over name tags for volunteers. I did not manage that whole week to do anything else on my list. I have no idea why. So no additional jammies got done.
I did however, manage to finish the sleeve pictured in the last entry and sew together the fronts to the backs before realizing that I was supposed to block it and THEN sew it. Oh well.

Somewhere in here, I did manage to block all the pieces of the sweater.

Then boy howdy. First, one thing you should probably realize about the part of Michigan I live in. We get snow, but not a LOT of snow. It is not uncommon for us to get 4-6 inches of snow for example, and not cancel everything. But, we do have 5 or 6 (I'm not clear because I have heard different things) snow days that will be "forgiven" by the state. So, in essence we can use up to that many days without going longer into the summer. This year we've had a very mild winter. There was a big snowfall at Christmas and not much of consequence since then. Our temps have been cold, but not "air hurts my face, my snot has frozen" cold.

Ok, so Feb 22 and 23 I was busy. I worked the freelance job, and my real job and got my hair cut and went to see a lecture (given by my husband). All the while the news was talking snowstorm. First it was minor, (1-3 inches) then major (8-12 inches) and then it seemed to change hourly--everyone agreed though it was going to start Wednesday. And then Tuesday we got a winter weather warning starting Wednesday at 11am. So when we got up on the 24th for school and there was not a flake in sight of course we didn't think school was canceled. But it was. And at almost exactly 11am it started to snow. and SNOW and SNOW. Eventually the rest of the week's school was canceled and we ended up with about 10 inches of wet heavy snow.

You would THINK that given this I'd have a finished object to show you. After all what was I doing besides sitting around and knitting?

I honestly have no idea.

I do know that somewhere in there I spent FOUR DAYS trying to pick up the stitches needed on mygirl Friday sweater for the collar and button band.

The instructions indicate that you should pick up the same amount of stitches on both sides of a marker you place, and end with an odd number. So I didn't even count (because um missed the part about even number I guess) and got 105 on one side and 126 on the other. Then I ripped. I did get the odd number I needed across the collar to get an odd number over all. Then I attempted to pick up exactly 105 stitches. Something on the order of 6 times.

When I finally managed it, I set the whole thing down for a day just to bask in the glory.

Then I started knitting the collar. I won't even tell you that I didn't quite understand the directions and had to rip out 2 inches of 1X1 knitting. Ok maybe I'll tell you that, but only because I can tell you that I did somehow manage to get to a point where I am now knitting the button bands.

But I am DISTRACTED

You see in there was my birthday and also my second installment of a sock yarn and now I just want to knit socks! And wouldn't you if you spent your birthday money (in part) on these:
DSCN5849
and then Your sock club yarn looked like this:

First rule of sock club is... Ooh pretty

A photo posted by Jodie (@ja_gardner) on

Of course you would. But you'd keep on knitting the sweater like a good mom.

Sure you would.

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