Under Duress

Thing 3 is leaping around on my bed, jostling his sister who is trying to use the digital camera to take pictures of her origami whale (displayed on her bedroom door with lots of superflous glue around it. Yippee). All this while I attempt to type and load pictures. It's not always this bad, but this is not an unusually bizarre day.

Despite the pressures under which I work, I managed to turn this:


Into this:



Which finally became this, modeled unblocked by the intended wearer, Thing 2.*



I am quite unhappy with my short rows, despite nona's fabulous tutorial. Clearly I must practice. One of the underarm grafts looks a little bit like the results of enthusiastic but decidedly amateur plastic surgery. I'm going to rely on the inherent cuteness of my kid and the frenetic pace at which she generally moves to disguise the lumpiness.

Or else I'll do a lot of nagging at her to put her arm down, for Pete's sake!

The baby Thing apparently heard my teeth-gnashing and has put in a couple of nights of "consecutive hours in a row" kind of sleep, my spouse is doing laundry in addition to working hard so I have time and money to knit, I've managed to knit an entire repeat of "Dainty Bess" without muffing it up, and things are looking up.

Oh, and the tree is mostly out of the back yard, leaving more room for island excavation. I think the Phillipines are going in next.

*Project specs: Solid yarn is BaaBaaJoe's Woolpak 10 ply #34, Royal Blue, and the kind of flashy/pooly vareigated is Manukau Yarns "Charisma" 8 ply double knit, color 0958. Main part knit on 8s, loosely based on the round yoke sweater from The Knitter's Handy Book of Sweater Patterns. I modified randomly as I went, but really, how much can you do to a classsic sweater shape?