Weekly Workbasket – getting my money’s worth from my yarn (100th post)

I managed to remember to take photos of the yarn that is used in the creation of the little Christmas Sweaters.

On my lunch break, I had finished the front of the little red sweater.  The whole time I was knitting it, I kept catching myself reading the wrong measurements.  I should be using the second one inside the parenthesis.  I managed to make the front of the sweater correctly.  I started to grow suspicious of the already completed sweater back… sure enough, it was too short.  :-/  By the time I had picked out all the cast off shoulder stitches, knitted several rows incorrectly, pulled them out, got distracted while casting off the first shoulder and casting them all off, picked them all out again and correctly did the shoulders I had used up 2 hours with no progress.

When joining the shoulder seams, using the mattress stitch, I like to use any long ends that may be at the place that I need to do the joining. You may have noticed that I have many ends to weave in, eventually. Marking the sleeve placements (belatedly) at the required (for this size, after double checking I was looking at the correct one) nine inches. Then I proceeded to cast-o-and-knit and tear it back out. Repeated until I gave up. Sometimes a project just needs to be put in time out for awhile.

After a reasonable amount of time in timeout (my plan is still to have it finished by Christmas) I got right back at it.  I read the instructions and they said, “Beg with WS row, work in St st for 11…”. Right then, 11 inches.  As I was knitting this 11 inches I kept thinking that it was going to be a looooong sleeve to do 11 inches before the first decrease.  Being that on this sweater 6 rows equal an inch, I figured that 66 rows later would be 11 inches.  You know what?  It was!  You know what else?  It was supposed to be 11 ROWS not inches.  Frogged 9 inches back to the 11th row and started my decreases.  I should have read the whole sentence in the instructions.

only 2 more decreases to go before the cuff. I just might make my timeline!