The procrastinating Mici

Before I forget, let me begin with a friendly reminder that my new pattern, the Tyche Hoodie is still available at a 20% discounted price on Ravelry and Etsy today and tomorrow! The discount is not working in my Payhip store and on LoveCrafts. Sale ends February 20, 2022. Midnight CET.

(I hope you notice my new child size mannequin, which my husband bought me after I was cracking up because we have children who are useless for knitwear photography… I am joking, of course 😀 … I love them more than anything. The problem is with my skills of taking good photos, obviously. But my children are useless for knitwear photography, too.)

All that being said, let’s jump onto what happened this week on GK. If I want to put it out there as shortly as I can, it would be one word: NOTHING.

It all happened because I got frustrated by a huge bucket of yarn under my desk (I keep my WIPs there, and they usually take up a space of the size of 2 boxes packed on top of each other, which is fine. I like it that way, because I can always grab one of the projects to work on while I watch a YouTube video on my computer or wait for something to load – oh, how I loooove Windows updates every week or so… – But I also had this bucket full of super bulky yarn there. – You may remember when I wrote about my new year’s resolutions for 2022 in a previous post, I have mentioned a raglan pullover that I knitted from the leftover yarns from a previous project knitted in Phildar Phil Alaska, which was a complete failure and had to be unraveled. Now this was the one), and I just couldn’t sit at my desk without my legs colliding with the bucket all the time. One day I got so annoyed with it that I could throw the whole thing out the window. I thought this is high time it disappeared. I had so many other – more important – things to do…. I should have left it… Now I wish I threw that bucket out the window instead…

First of all, I spent half a day finding a suitable sweater pattern. Soon I have realized that I don’t have the required amount of yarn for that one, so I thought I should be OK with some modification to the original pattern. Of course I ended up with a LOT of modification to the pattern…

Here is what I did:

  1. I used a 6mm/US10 size needle all over. This gave me a completely different gauge but I liked the final fabric that it produced more.
  2. I am usually a size S but cast on and started to knit according to size M/L.
  3. I left out the pockets because of the shortage of yarn. Therefore I knitted the fronts in all stockinette after the hem.
  4. Since my gauge was different, I knew that the fit/ease will be different from the original, too, so I cut the length of the sweater by around X cm.
  5. Point 4. meant that I had to re-calculate the position of decreases at the front necks.
  6. I used 3-needle bind off at the shoulder seams, and seamed the the sides with mattress stitch.
  7. I originally thought it will end up as a vest, since I wouldn’t have enough yarn for the sleeves, but after I got to this point, I still had about 7 balls (which I didn’t want to put back under the table…), so I thought I should give a try to sleeves of some kind.
  8. Instead of knitting the sleeves bottom-up, I knitted them top down. I picked up stitches around the armholes, because I was not sure if I had the right amount of yarn to finish both sleeves.
  9. I picked up 58 stitches around the armholes, and calculated the number and frequency of decreases like it was long-sleeved. Fortunately I could manage to finish both sleeves and I was left with a tiny bit of leftover (as seen on the photos below).
  10. I changed the stripes of color to random here, since I had to use what I got (When I knitted the fronts and the back, I was sparing the white yarn for the collar, but when I finished, I realized, maybe the dark grey will be enough, too, and it would be a better choice. So I used up all dark grey for the collars and I was left with a bunch of white… Anyway, it is not that bad this way…

It turned out like this:

I must admit that I quite like the result, but then I turned the sweater inside out and saw this:

I immediately knew that the rest of the week was busted…

So that is how a week went by and I managed to do absolutely nothing GK-wise or knitwear designer course-wise (though I really wanted to at least finish my fiber report this week…). Bummer.

I really should stop procrastinating. It is sooo unproductive. But at least now I have space for my legs under my desk and a cardigan to keep me warm as I am sitting there typing up the rest of my fiber report and the short row shaping of the hem of my newest design, the Pomona sweater

I would really love to read about your experiences about procrastinating. Do you procrastinate? If not, how do you avoid it???

I hope to see you next week! Until then…

Happy Knitting!

Mici