Well, 

That went fast.

It's kind of sad when you go to your blog because your wee baby boy is turning (gulp) THIRTEEN and you're looking for cute pictures of him when he was small, only to realize you haven't updated your blog in (gasp) FIVE years.  

It's been a long five years.

It's also been a very short, very fast five years.

The quick update is:  my kids are growing like weeds, Chris is perilously close to finishing med school, and I feel like I'm running as fast as I can just trying not to fall off the treadmill, but...that's barely adequate.  

So far this year...Lilu turned 9 (how?!), I turned 45 (and I feel it), Chris finished his 3rd year rotations, he crushed his Internal Medicine shelf exam and then turned around and nailed STEP 2, I took the kids to Yorktown and Colonial Williamsburg, Maggie turned 6 (oh my heck), we've made a few trips to Georgia, my father in law bought me this amazing antique spinning wheel at auction and I had a new flyer built for it, we've done a ton of math and reading (Maggie is now literate, and with that I retire from teaching phonics) and building and making and learning (though not nearly enough swimming and hiking).

Why, yes, I did make them matching sweaters (all Mountain Mist by Tin Can Knits, Cameron's is greens, Lilu's pink and black and Maggie's all purples).  We have fun and try to keep calm and carry on regardless of which way the wind blows, or what's blowing in it.

We did a deep dive into American History this past year, it was wonderful.  And when we were up in Yorktown and Williamsburg, we took the opportunities to take selfies with every George Washington statue we could find.

Oh, and I forgot that I reverse engineered the sweater from Knives Out.  (I didn't see the movie, I don't care for murder mysteries, but Google knows that I'm a knitter, so when the sweater went viral I started seeing pictures of it all over my google feed, and I thought to myself, "yes.  I can make that.  and I shall.  Just to prove to you all that I CAN."  So I did.  It's glorious, but SO warm.  I feel like I need to live in the arctic to get a decent amount of wear out of it.

photographic proof that I'm still here.

Don't mind me...

Remember that lovely picture from Wednesday?  The one with 2/3 of the front of Na Craga finished and another 6 inches of the back? 

Well, I worked really hard this week and I got to where I should have been able to shape the back portion, I counted all of the cable repeats, I measured and measured and it wasn't long enough.  Not by a long shot.  I stared at it for an hour last night trying to figure out why it wasn't long enough.  And then I laid it side by side with the front and tried to match up the seam that will be.

That's when I looked at the cuff.  The CUFF.  And it wasn't long enough.  But I thought, "I know I would have counted that to make sure I have the right number of rows!"  So I counted again.   I was 2 rows short.  TWO.  In the CUFF.

So then I sat there (this was 11:15 at night) and wracked my brain trying to think about how to preserve all of those cables and still fix the cuff.  But here's the problem.  The cuff is a twisted rib.  So I could have unpicked the cast on edge and then picked up the stitches and knitted back down the 2 rows, but doing that in the reverse will reverse the twist of the rib and thus look backwards.  I could have cut the cuff off, reknitted it and then attempted to graft it back together, but that's going to throw off the row count on the cables.  There was no alternative, but to rip the whole thing out.13.5 inches of cables, GONE.

This morning, I am just trying not to cry.

The Present

Excuse me while I take a momentary break from the past to, well, complain about something in the present.

So for the past, oh seven years (since I learned how to knit), Chris has been asking me for a sweater.  And not just a plain, basic, run-o-the-mill sweater.  An every day, who cares if it gets dirty sweater, but an intricately cabled sweater.  A fancy sweater, an HEIRLOOM sweater. 

When he started med school, I thought to myself, "Maybe I'll make him that intricate sweater and give myself 4 years to finish it.  It can my my Med School project."  And I gave him fair warning, that I would make him said sweater, but I would take as long as I wanted to finish it.  Because, and this is the material point.  I'm not very good at cabling.  I seem to have a natural affinity for color work, it comes quick and fast for me.  But cabling?  Cabling is HARD.  I have to really focus on what I'm doing and I can't ever zone out, I have to keep reminding myself which row I'm on and look at the stitches that I'm knitting because some of them change and some of them remain the same.  So at the time, I thought this was a reasonable plan.

And then I started it.

Back in early May, I found this beautiful pattern.  It's an Alice Starmore (she's an AMAZING designer from the Hebrides in Scotland) and I have most of her pattern books, but I've put off knitting anything from them because I just didn't feel like I was a good enough knitter to try them.  But I thought, I have four years to figure it out!  It'll be fine!  So I knitted up a gauge swatch (and got gauge for the first time EVER), so I cast on.  I worked the cuff and got the cables started and was feeling pretty good about it, so I thought I'll pack it to Utah with me, we'll be in the car a lot, it'll be nice to have something to work on.  So I did that.

And the yarn...the yarn is this pine, muddy green, but looking at it in the sunshine out in Utah, it just came alive with flecks of emerald and gold and orange and teal in it and it was so pretty that I really was completely surprised by it.  So I kept working on it.  (If you follow me in Instagram, you'll have seen pictures about it.)

I got about 5 inches done on the front, and then started the back because I knew if I finished the front and had to start all over on the back then I would just dissolve into a puddle of defeated tears.  So I finished about 5 inches of the back and then set it aside while I finished the winter sweaters for the kids for this year (don't worry, they got plain, boring, run-o-the-mill sweaters).  And I lost the momentum.  And worse than that, my anxiety about working so many cables came BACK.  So then it just sat there, in my knitting bag, intimidating me.

I finished the sweaters for the kids and was worrying about Na Craga, so I just left it alone and I asked Chris what kind of socks he wanted for Christmas.  And you can probably guess what his reply was, "I'd rather have the sweater, it'll be more useful to me on campus...please?"  So I confessed that I was feeling a little intimidated by the sweater at the moment, and then I did what any slightly overwhelmed mother-home schooler-knitter would do and I cast on another sweater for Lilu.  It was a simple little pullover, it took me 2 weeks.

But at that point, I could avoid it no longer, so I went back to Na Craga.  I pulled it out, I looked at how much I had knitted and how much I still had to go.  I thought about the skills that I was going to have to LEARN before Christmas, because there are all of these things that I'm required to do that I've never done before, and back in May when I gave myself four years to knit it, it all seemed do-able, but now, in August, when I'm trying to finish by Christmas, it seems really scary!  But I've been working on it...and here's proof.

The bigger piece is the front, it's about 2/3 of the way finished, and the smaller piece is the back, it's exactly where I left it in June.  I still have all of the neck shaping, 2 sleeves and a collar to knit, and then I have to figure out how to assemble the whole monstrosity.  Before Christmas.


Pray for us sinners.


(I told Christopher on Sunday that I may never knit him anything else EVER again.  And he promptly said, "I'll ask for something simple next time!"  Hah.  As if there's going to be a NEXT time.)