Okay, everything’s done except the buttons. Mom and I actually know which ones we prefer. (Well, it’s ultimately my choice, of course, but she’s HERE and has great taste, so naturally I ask for her opinion, too.) It’s not the best picture (there were close ups the other day), but… the top one is wood, the middle one is like a little, brass sand dollar, and the bottom is the same button that I used on my orange sweater.

Which reminds me, I need to sew the buttons back onto that sweater, too, now that I’ve finished its new button bands, too.

Sadly, though, right now I’m “knitless” because I don’t have anything on the needles, because I still don’t have a pattern for my yarn unravelled from my Celtic Dreams. I’d like to do the FLAK pattern, but am at a complete stand-still because I don’t know where to start. Not because the pattern is unclear, because it’s not, but because, without having the least idea what my gauge is going to be … because my knitting is always absurdly loose … I can’t even figure out how many cables I might or might not need. So I don’t even know where to start with a swatch … And the swatch I tried in just moss switch? As I relaxed while knitting, the gauge loosened even on that.

In other words, short of casting on 80-100 stitches and randomly picking a bunch of variously-sized cables to make a HUGE swatch, I just don’t know what to do. How can you pick out cables when you have NO idea even what size cables you need? Or how the cables will affect the gauge compared to the background stitch?

Especially when you notoriously have NO patience for making swatches. I mean, I do make them for every project I start–you know that I do–but they never actually end up the same size as the finished sweater. (Really, never.) Even if I picked a handful of cables and wasted yarn swatching each and every one of them … I don’t trust that they would actually match the math I need. (You know, that’s why my Celtic Dreams came out so much wider at the bottom … the gauge changed as I knit.)

Sigh. I know, I’m just whining and should settle down and do the math and make the stupid swatches … but that holds as much appeal as, well, my mind is blank. But something dreadfully dull, tedious, and ultimately pointless. Really, feel free to just ignore me. I just miss knitting… (grin)

I DO have a half-finished sock in my purse, but … blah. As many different sock patterns I have, as many sock BOOKS, I always knit plain-jane stockinette socks, and that gets dull. So, why not knit new socks? Well, one, I’d need to carry the pattern around, and my purse just isn’t that big. But also, two, I would have to re-do the math for every pattern. My freakily loose gauge and narrow feet mean that my standard socks are only 44 stitches around–and on a size-one needle, nonetheless. Those needles are so narrow, knitting for more than an hour makes my fingers ache.

Sigh.

I SUPPOSE I could start some other project while I’m trying to figure out what to do with my lovely, reclaimed Black Water Abbey yarn, but … that‘s what I want to work on, darn it!

You know what I really want to do with it? If I could figure out how? Re-do the Celtic Dreams, but as a cardigan this time. Except, since it came out so large last time–with my using the smallest size instructions, and a size THREE needle with my Aran yarn–I can’t figure out how to make it smaller and still be the Celtic Dreams, you know? I’d have to leave out cables, which would throw off the symmetry, or buffer each cable with only 1 purl stitch instead of 2, but that would crowed them too close, I think…

Sigh.

See? This is the problem with being a monogamous knitter…

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