Drano for Knitters...

My friend Erica and I have this joke that always makes us giggle. It's not a particularly witty or sophisticated joke, but it makes us laugh. In a lot of ways, that joke can be applied here.

What's this?

It's a whole bunch of these...

Hmmm... on second thought, that might actually only be funny when cocktails are involved.

Either way- my incredibly bad joke serves to show us one thing, I HAVE UNCLOGGED THE KNITTING BLOCKAGE and finally made some decent progress on the blanket. It's basically taken a month of hmming, hahing and second guessing myself, but I've finally started to dig in and start making progress.

After my last blog post, where I confessed my disdain for the pattern, I did some soul searching. I even had the mother in law search too- and got the honest opinion. That blanket was not good. I was fooling myself. After hearing the truth and saying it out loud to myself, I knew there was only one thing left to do. Go back to the drawing board.

I ripped out three skeins of knitting...

It was actually a very good decision. Not only did I discover that I had miscalculated my gauge along the way and had FIVE extra inches in width that I didn't want, but looking at all that garter stitch I just couldn't care about it at all.

Some careful math later and realizing I was over-complicating something very simple, I adjusted my border to five stitches on each end and JUST KNIT THE PATTERN five times over. It maybe took me 5 minutes to plan out. Considering it took me close to 2 hours to write everything out on the wildly disappointing version, I took the ease to which this came to me as a very good sign.

And so I'm knitting a blanket finally. And just in time too! By my calculation this kid could show up anytime now! I began knitting in earnst on Friday, Oct 2. Today is the 5th. My big goal is to have HALF this blanket done by Friday. That's 2.5 patterns. I'd appreciate any and all positive thoughts you could send my way! :-)