Tuesday, January 24, 2012

The Healing Power of Paisley

Yesterday was not the best day ever. Yesterday was night number #6 in a row of not really sleeping and I'm just one of those people that needs a lot of sleep to be a functional person that doesn't snap or cry at the slightest agitation. And yesterday was agitating to say the least. Mondays at work at normally pretty quiet, a good chunk of yarn shops are closed which means I get all caught up on my filing, do things I've been putting off for a week and sometimes leave a smidge early. Yesterday there was a warehouse emergency which I won't go in to, but it was a bad, cold and very long day.

On the way home I checked my email and there was a response from Mr. Alabama. He's not interested. Naturally. Got home to find that some yarn I ordered from Etsy was all wrong and the artist is telling me that it's a heavy worsted even though it is very clearly a sport weight yarn. I like to think I know a thing or two about yarn and when someone tells me that I am WRONG WRONG WRONG and that the yarn that looks best on size 4 needles is a heavy worsted weight yarn and I spent a lot of money on this sweater's worth of it, it frustrates me.

I thought about opening a bottle of Chardonnay and watching last season of "Being Human" so I'd be caught up for last night's episode, but instead I wiped up the mascara that was running down my chin and sat down at the sewing machine to work on the sun dress. And today I'm
feeling a little better. Now if only I could get some sleep.

In pleasantly surprising news, it turns out that I am much farther along in my Knit it Forward surprise than I thought. It is the red thing if you are one of the knitters who has seen my mystery project. The pattern calls for 9 repeats of a certain (very large) chart and since I've made this pattern before and vaguely remembered the size and how long it took me to make, as I was halfway through my 5th repeat of the chart and I thought I'd double check and see if I really did the whole 9 that the pattern asked for- this thing is starting to get close to the size of the first one I made. I also seriously doubted that I had enough yarn to do the full 9 repeats plus a final chart. Nope. I did 6 repeats before moving on to the chart. Don't you love it when you're suddenly much farther along in the pattern than you think you are?

Anyhow, here's the dress in the gray light of an Indiana winter morning.
A close up of the front. Can you see the curve where the skirt meets the bust? That was supposed to be a point. My bad! I also tightened the cleavage band (probably not a technical term) to make it look more ruched. There will be a zipper and a hook and eye...when I get over my fear of installing a zipper. It still needs straps and the bottom hemmed, but so far so good (that means that it started out as a dress and hasn't turned into a tote bag yet).

2 comments:

Bonnie said...

I'm so sorry you're not sleeping. That makes everything bigger, louder, more annoying, and horrid. The dress is gorgeous, as is the cross stitch. I think it looks great with the border you have on it currently; it would be pretty even without the checkerboard. I hope today is better!

Paige Darling said...

Thanks Bonnie! That's really sweet of you to comment! And I've come up with a border that I like in theory- it combines my love of fair-isle knitting and crocheted granny squares and incorporates them in to cross stitch. It could be cute, or could be absolutely terrible, but it's hard to find a properly fitting border when one of the stitch counts is a prime number. Darn my extra stitch!