1-There is nothing like a quick trip to your local yarn shop to provide solace when you misplace your knitting. Four skeins of Madeline Tosh later, the whole world is a more beautiful place.
2-The solace of the trip to your LYS is magnified when you discover that they have two lovely, quick patterns for your new yarn. One involves double knitting and is incredibly smooshy.
3-There is, however, no true cure for how dumb you feel when you realize the sweater sleeves you've been knitting two at a time are nowhere to be found. On the plus side: Your were only a few inches in, they were way too big and we're going to have to be ripped out anyhow, and you've still got three untouched skeins plus several small balls of leftovers, so you should be able to muddle through. On the downside: you have to feel guilty about all the times your Mother in Law told you she was developing CRS disease and you snickered. (I adored my Mil and she could be quite bawdy. CRS stands for "can't remember sh*t".)
4-Glacier is going to be an amazing sweater when it's done. I bound off the front this evening, after conquering the directions, which cheerily advised me that after finishing the left side, I should just reverse all of the directions to knit the right side. Not as easy as it sounds.
But, my stepped shoulder decreases are beautiful and perfectly matched. The moment when I realized this was a profoundly exciting one in my life.
5-I have discovered knitting fiction. I don't read romance or mystery novels, but I'm hooked. What's not to like about a book where our heroine is the only human (and yarn store proprietress) in a town full of trolls, vampires, shape shifters and fairies? My friends on Ravelry recommended the first one, The Great Christmas Knit Off, and now I've got a stack on my bedside table to help with my New Years resolution to knock off working on the computer and read for 20-30 minutes before going to bed. Supposedly this is better for you. I'm not going to encounter great fiction this way but the books have a charm that grows on you, replete with mentions of Noro, Rowan, and the difficulty of knitting bobbles. My snotty teenaged reader is horrified. That was the final selling point.
This weekend I hope to find the d@mn sleeves and do the math to knit ones that will fit better, get in some work on my Drachenfels, which has been languishing, and knit a swatch with a colorway I'm trying to work out and have dyed a couple of ways to see which I like the best. And laundry. Mountains of laundry. It really cuts into my knitting time and I resent it!
