What a Life!

I wanted to take a picture of our tree, and of course Ben had to pose in front of the tree…so here is our Christmas tree.

It really doesn’t look as bare in real life as it seems to in this picture. Last year when we bought the tree, rather than spending another wad of money on a bunch of ornaments, we decided to use the ones we had (or that Steve had from when he was a kid) and then add a few every year as gifts in our stockings Christmas morning. So some day our tree will look much fuller than this, but this is what we have now.

Now, as for what’s going under the tree and my current knitting dilemmas…I knit this sweater for Steve. Isn’t it a nice sweater?

He has no idea he’s getting a sweater for Christmas. I showed him the pattern last summer and asked him if he’d wear that sweater if I knit it for him and he said, “Yes.” A couple months later, I was in a yarn store that called the yarn the sweater pattern called for, and the yarn wasn’t horrendously expensive so I decided to knit him a sweater. I knit the front of it in September, the back in October, and the sleeves in November, and then I seamed it all up in December.

Since Steve doesn’t know I’m making a sweater for him, it is rather tricky trying to make it the right size so it will fit. In the picture that accompanies the pattern, the sweater looks a little oversized. When I bought the yarn, they only had ten skeins of yarn in the color I needed, and the pattern called for eleven in the size I thought I would probably need to make. (When you buy yarn for a sweater, it is important to buy it all at once so that it is from the same dye lot – otherwise, even though the yarn is theoretically the same color, there may be differences that will show up once the garment is knit.) The salesperson at the yarn store pointed out that the sweater was a bit oversized and said that if I made it a little less oversized, I should have enough yarn even though technically I was one skein short.

So I bought the yarn and started knitting. I measured all of Steve’s sweatshirts to figure out what size to make the sweater. I figured, if he wore the sweatshirts, they must fit him, and if the sweater was the same size as the sweatshirts, it would fit too. I did shorten the body of the sweater by about three inches, and once I did that, based on how quickly I was using up the yarn, I was pretty sure I would have enough yarn to complete the pattern.

Well, I did not run out of yarn. But on the sleeves, the increases that widen the sleeve as you go up were every five rows instead of every four rows as they usually are in patterns. I didn’t really think much of it as I was knitting the sweater. Once I finished the sweater, I laid it out with one of his sweatshirts to verify that the size was correct. The body of the sweater was perfect, but the sleeves…alas! they were too long!

I didn’t really have time to re-do the sleeves at that point, nor did I really want to. When Steve has had shirts that shrank in the wash and no longer fit, it’s always the length of the sleeves that he complains about. And when I buy him new shirts, he’ll wear one size in short sleeve shirts and a size larger in the long sleeve shirts just so the sleeves are long enough. So it is plausible that the sleeves on his sweatshirt are on the short side and that the length of the sleeves on this sweater won’t be a problem. Yes, possible. So I am taking no action at this point. In fact, the sweater is wrapped an under the tree as we speak.

While we’re speaking of sizing issues, I have another knitting project where I am again doing the project based on my best guess of the correct size.

Steve mentioned in November that he wants some hybrid gloves. Mittens are warmer than gloves, but if you wear mittens, sometimes you need to use your fingers and not just a “paw” so you have to take your entire mitten off in order to complete the task and your hand gets cold. Well, they make these gloves with shortened fingers and then with a mitten flap that goes over your fingers so supposedly you can get the best of both worlds. This would be what I have completed thus far:

I would really prefer that he try the first one on before I do the second in order to make sure it fits. But, of course, since these are intended to be Christmas gifts, that is not an option. I could make just one, give it to him for Christmas, and then make the second one after Christmas once I knew for sure that it fit. Yes, I could do that, but then he couldn’t show off his gifts on Christmas day when his family comes over for Christmas dinner. Perhaps I’m being a bit vain, but them perhaps there are times when vanity is not a sin. Like with Hybrid Gloves that you design and knit for someone.

So yes, Christmas is coming…but ever so slowly. I mean, I’ll be so relieved when it finally gets here because then I will know whether or not these things I am working so hard on actually fit. That’s right – fit, fit, fit!