And In Other News...

...The Sigma Tank has been frogged. That's not because it's not a beautiful top, because it is. I've just not got the energy to start taking it apart to the place where I accidentally mobius-stripped it.

On the other hand - the frogging has convinced me there is a Knitting God.

It has also convinced me that I'm a knitting gauge-tension nitwit.

The reason is as follows:
When I did the calculations for Sigma, I gauge-swatched it. The results, summed up by the formula that was in the pattern, made it 240 stitches to cast on. You can't -possibly- go wrong with a formula and a gauge swatch, right? Especially when I stretched it out on the needles and it looked just nice, even allowing for some looseness in the yarn after knitting.

So I took the thing off the needles, all 240 stitches of it. And discovered that it would fit my best friend easily, no sweat. Not even tightness.

My best friend is male, 6'4" and built like a linebacker.

I, on the other hand, barely top 5', if you don't count that I'm always wearing huge clunky heels, and I weigh less than 110lbs. Or around that anyway.

Humbling, humbling, embarrassing-as-heck.

However! I -have- finished ONE knitting project and that is a catnip mouse for my SO's two cats! It's the one posted in Wendy's Mouse-A-Thon.

And even there the knitting nincompoopness continued because I didn't understand the extremely simple directions and wound up frogging the entire thing at lunch today at work. But! BUT! I finished it ALL UP today so I am proud of myself. I was taught to knit on the fly with no patterns, so reading patterns is uber-hard; I'm just not used to it.

I've decided to take my knitting to work and use my lunchtime to accomplish stuff. Today I was in the Indian restaurant two doors down from the office, drinking iced chai and knitting away on the catnip mouse, and there were two Westerners eating two tables up. One was bald and one had curly hair; both were male. When they finished their food, the curly-haired one kept looking at my knitting. It was sort of funny and I still don't know why he was looking. Maybe the fact that I was dressed like an office-going Goth (all black with a funky high-necked top that had a diagonal zipper down the front) had something to do with it.