Some days....

....I wonder why I knit.

Okay, so not really, but today was almost frustrating enough to make me throw all my yarn out the window. I finally resurrected the Blue Romper from WIP Hibernation:

I started it last January or so, before I had Darren. I made the size 2, thinking, "Oh, this will be done long before he can wear it." You'd think I'd know myself better by now. He's nine months old tomorrow, and the thing still isn't done.

Honestly, after digging it out again, I'm not sure why I set it aside; I had the boring back done (all stockinette and ribbing) and was past the boring part on the front. I had the left front finished in no time:

But the right front has been the bane of my existance. The directions aren't bad, exactly, just pretty vague (I guess back in the 30s they expected a certain amount of "knitting common sense). First, I just plain did the pattern wrong. Then, I had the garter band on the outer edge, instead of in the center, where it could act as a button band. Out came 5 rows. Then, I something wrong with the number of stitches on either side of the pattern. Out came 6 rows. Then, I suddenly realized that I had made my garter band 7 sts too wide; it should have been 6 sts in stockinette, 7 in garter. Out came 8 rows.

The directions are so exceedingly vague, though! "Turn and work to correspond with left front." After frogging the same 8 rows about five times, I finally rewrote the directions for the right front in Excel. (Yes, I triple checked it for accuracy. I'm sure I still managed to make some stupid mistake.)

Amusing blogs I found just now:
Apostrophe Abuse
The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks

And last but not least, Darren in his Halloween regalia (edited to remove my greasy face):

(PS-->He's a horse.)

ETA: I want to appologize for the lack of paragraphs. I deplore when people fail to use proper paragraphs, but no matter what I do, blogger will not let me!

Okay, so the tree is not an exciting picture, but I feel obligated to post SOME picture with every post. This is from our trip to the park on Saturday. It was unseasonably warm here (80-ish, I believe) and it seemed wrong to not take advantage of the weather. (And, of course, father-son antics took place as well. My first born child is being tossed in the air here. I generally avoid watching this sort of thing. I know that Ryan won't really drop him, but if I don't watch, I don't have to worry.)

I'm using the nice weather as my excuse for not doing much. I do need to start sewing again, though--it turns out that the pants I sewed for Darren are more than a little too big. They're too big in every way. They may fit him in a year. (Oh, and might I also mention that my mom made a pair, too. So I now have two pairs of pants way too big for him.) B/c the pattern is Kwik-Sew, though, this means I have to trace out another one. Tracing is far from my favorite thing today. I will be home all day tomorrow, though, so that's on my list of things to do.

I must also take a picture of the onsie-outfit-thing that I'm knitting for Darren. I started it, oh, last December or so when I was still pregnant. I even did the back first, because it was boring--straight stockinette, broken up only by ribbing--and I wanted to get it done while I still had the excitement of a new project going for me. For unknown reasons, it was relagated to the Pile of Forgotten Projects, doomed to be forgotten. Until, that is, Knitting Daily came out with it's UFO (unfinished objects) poll. In tallying my UFOs, I suddenly remembered this romper. Inspired mainly by a lack of any real knitting projects, I decided to dig it out. And honestly, I have NO idea why I put it down. The back (read: the boring part) was done, and I was nearly finished with the boring part of the front: the lower, stockinette part was done, and I only needed to do about 8 rows of ribbing, and then it was on to the fun, patterned part of the front. Now that I've gotten going on it, though, I'm a bit concerned that, even though it's in blue, it's going to look too girly. (I've found that collars tend to do that.) However, I've also decided that I don't care. My kid is going to wear this, whether it make him look like a girl or not!

I can just imagine: 30 years from now, my son's on a therapist's couch saying, "It all started when she made me wear this girly romper...."