Lies, damn lies, and swatches

I have been lied to. I have been let down. Betrayed. Mislead. Scammed by a piece of string.

I know it's not all that unusual for a swatch to lie, but boy, this was a whopper, a BFL, a lie of truly epic proportions.

I'm attempting to knit a DROPS cardigan in DK-weight cotton, but I have to say at this point, it's not going well. It starts like this:

I swatch. I measure. My gauge is too small. I block, just in case. I measure. Still too small. Okay, I rip out the swatch.

I go up a needle size. I swatch. I measure. I block again, just in case. This time, the gauge is perfect.

I cast on 118 stitches, which should give me a 22.5"-wide piece of knitting.

It doesn't.

I work a few rows, measure, and stare blankly at my tape measure. I finger-block the knitting experimentally. I am four inches in to this sweater, and the 22.5" back? It is 26" wide. And that's before I attempt to stretch it. Remember, this sweater is cotton, which means it's supposed to have negative ease.

Four inches over 26 inches is quite a change, so I go down two needle sizes and start over. I would have declared it beer o'clock, except that my SnB meets in a decidedly dry coffee shop. Instead, I chugged a hot chocolate and cast on 118 stitches again.

I knit to the beginning of the lace section and stop to take a measurement, because now I am wise to the cotton's wily ways. This proves to be a valuable moment of clarity, as the 22.5" back now measures 24" precisely.

At this point, I feel I ought to offer an apology to the other patrons of the shop, as my remarks about the sweater became a bit heated. My engineer buddy and I did some quick math- in a moment of stunningly clear foresight, I had brought a calculator along in my knitting bag- and I realized that there was no way on earth I was going to get gauge with this yarn. I would be knitting on pins before I got the required gauge.

I needed to reduce the number of stitches.

At this point, having been working on this confounded sweater for approximately five hours, with a small break to crash the sale at the LYS, I decided I was done. Really done. To console myself, I attempted to begin a simple triangle shawl, could not figure out how many stitches to cast on, could not figure out where to place the decreases, ripped it all off the needles, and called it a night.

An arithmetic analysis of my knitting tonight would show that I achieved the impossible: a negative stitch velocity. I knit continuously through tonight's SnB, and at the end of the night I had less knitting to show for it than I came in with.

I think I may cry.

Charms: It makes me smile

My Charms assignment went more quickly than I thought; taking out the laundry and dishes and midnight snacks in between, it was probably two, or at most three, hours from casting on to taking coy half-self-portraits.

The January Charms assignment:

This month you will be learning The Patronus Charm.

Expecto Patronum

Knitting or crocheting as a cure for seasonal depression. Self explanatory. Pretty much knit anything that will make YOU happy. May not be a gift for someone else. No matter how much you NEED to get a beret made by the 9th for your best friends birthday.

And the finished assignment:


And it worked; I am feeling relaxed and happy after knitting this in a way I haven't felt in quite a while, and here are seven reasons why:

1. The yarn. It's Manos Silk Blend. It feels like clouds and baby skin on my head.
   
2. It was instant gratification knitting. I don't do a lot of instant gratification knitting. But this? This is like record time for a project. I have knit dishcloths that took longer than this. Accomplishing goals improves my mood.
   
3. I have a deep and abiding love for purple. If I could produce a corporeal Patronus, it might just turn out to be a hyperintelligent shade of lavender. I saw this yarn and had. to. have. it. I identify with purple, and have since I was writing intensely serious poems on the back of my science papers in middle school. This is my color.
   
4. I have more of this yarn left over. I could make another one if I wanted. I could make matching wristlets or something. I could keep the leftovers as a pet. Point is, the fun's not over yet.
   
5. It's reversible- it looks just as cute with the purl side out. Maybe cuter.
   
6. Successful pattern adaptation. This thing is a Calorimetry, except it's nothing like a Calorimetry. Nicer rib. More delicate yarn. Less winter necessity, more hair accessory. And dudes...
   
   It has ties. Oh yeah. I kicked this pattern's butt.
   
7. I lied. There is no seven. This makes me happy too, somehow.

One assignment down. If I can knock out the DADA assignment (a tiny little mug cozy) tomorrow, that leaves me the rest of the month for Herbology and Quidditch. It might even leave me time to try my hand at some of the other courses...

Soar on, Ravenclaw!

(Oh, that polka-dot blanket that the teddy bear is lying on? That's what you got me for Christmas, Nana.)

David Allen, will you marry me?

I am not, by nature, an organized person. I am a creative person. I make connections between things in all directions, not always in obvious ways. This means that while I like to categorize and organize and have structure, I am pretty bad at coming up with structure on my own, because I get overwhelmed by all the different ways it could be done.

Enter the eternally sexy David Allen. And by "sexy", I mean... balding middle-aged consultant in a suit. But any man- or woman, for that matter- who could come up with an organizational system that actually makes sense to me automatically earns the appellation "eternally sexy". It's a rule. Look it up.



I went out and splurged on this last night. It's moderately famous among geeky sorts, and I'd heard of it before but never really understood the concept. Turns out, it's this perfectly brilliant system for getting stuff out of your head, so you don't have to worry about it constantly.

I stayed up way late last night reading it, and by the time I was done with the second part, I was determined to set this system up for myself. So today was Implementation Day. I followed the rules, I worked through the flowchart, I got in touch with my inner office supply fetishist, and at the end of the day:



I have folders.



I have a calendar.



I have a workspace where I can do actual work. (My desk doesn't count, because the computer takes up the entire desktop).

And best of all, I got things done today. Lots of things. I made phone calls and sent emails and faxed in forms and put batteries in things and went to the library and changed the paraments and emptied (emptied!!!) both my email inboxes and even had time to do some knitting. Freakin' amazing.

I am a superhero of productivity.

I knew I had to get this into place before I leave for North Dakota, because the one thing that would have made college a million times better for me is the one thing I could never figure out: study skills. Up until college, school was so easy for me that I didn't have to schedule study time or plan to work on assignments before the night before. I never learned the sort of organizational and time-management tricks that were a matter of survival for most people before they got to university. It made my life miserable, but I could never figure out a better way.

Hooray for the people who can figure out better ways!

I predict this semester suddenly becomes a thousand times easier than any semester before.