Rib-it, Rip-it

Saturday morning I was suffering from knitting withdrawal. I couldn't bear to work on Tasha anymore and none of my fabulous yarn had arrived. After poking around in my stash for a while and thumbing through some books, I decided I had the yarn to make a Sweet Pea Shawl from SnB: Crochet. It's like I don't think before I start projects, because low and behold as soon as I was set to begin, I finally looked at the pattern. First direction:

Ch 202

202! It was as if someone had suggested I make 140 squares and sew them into a blanket. Honestly, crochet is turning out to be quite an undertaking. So I chained the whole first chain, then I finished one shell and then the mail came.

Hooray mail! I got the smallest little box from elann with the yarn I'd ordered for Ali's Short Snort Tank. Two beautiful skeins of Lilac Satchet and two beautiful skeins of Rose Garden Sonata Print. They were lovely to just look at for about 20 minutes.



Then, in a fit of what can only be explained as a step toward knitting maturity, I opted to knit up a gauge swatch. Okay, it's only half a gauge swatch - but that's still better than nothing. :)



Lucky thing, too, 'cause the gauge was very different. Instead of beating my head against a wall about not noticing sooner, I got out my copy of SnB: Nation and consulted the part about substituting yarn based on gauge. After some fancy math calculations, I was ready to go.



Or so I thought . . . I started this damn thing 3 times! I was having quite a bit of trouble doing the very simple math to make sure that my CO sts were divisible by 4 so that my 2x2 ribbing would work. So I would cast on the 138-140-142 sts, rib a little and rip it out. Over and over. Until finally a light bulb went on and it all worked out.

I was able to get quite a bit done over the weekend, thanks to a trip to the movies with Ali and Wayne and general pregnancy restfulness. Here's where I'm at as of this afternoon:



I'm a little afraid that I don't have enough yarn, but I refuse to dwell on that until I have more proof. :)