The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

THE GOOD: I finished T1's sweater last night. I think it's really, really cute. The front and back were lots of fun to knit. And the yarn is scrumptious: soft soft, lofty, and lightweight. I like the colors, too.

THE BAD: The pattern has lots of fussy finishing. You have to pick up stitches four different times (for a total of nearly 400 stitches). The sleeves have to be swen in and then two long seams need sewing as well. And I'm going to have to do some blocking to correct that curl at the hem.

THE UGLY: The pattern is one of the worst I've worked with. In the sleeve shaping, decreases leave you with 11 stitches, but then the pattern calls for a bind-off that requires 13. The collar part says to work back and forth in garter stitch for 20 "rounds." The worst part, though, is that the shaping is quite eccentric due to the unusual construction of the front and back. At one point, the pattern says to sew a shoulder seam before picking up the neck stitches, but the pattern doesn't give any hint as to where that seam might be. And if you look at the pics to try and figure it out, good luck, because it turns out that in one of the pics the model is wearing the thing frigging backwards. It took me a long time to figure this out. A diagram or a few words of explanation would have been really, really helpful.

T1 celebrated her 8th birthday last week. Doesn't she look happy and grown up?

My inlaws came for the weekend to join the celebration. My SIL came with Melinda, one of her foster daughters. Melinda loves animals. As you can see, Ruthie considered this pure torture.

One Sunday, T2 and Hubby visited the pumpkin patch. Is tayed home with T1, who'd over-celebrated a bit the day before and was extremely cranky.

Fortunately, the crankiness was gone by yesterday. Last night, T1 helped me make turkey meatloaf.