Summer rolls on

Thanks for the advice in baby-making, it was very enlightening. I mean, in making stuff for babies. The other way would be weird. I got as far as yarn:

Acrylic, natch (though some people claim that acrylic is a bad choice for babies because it melts in a fire--but my feeling is that if your baby is on fire, you probably have bigger problems than that). As you might have noticed, Sammy has already 'tested' the durability of the yellow yarn. He couldn't even leave me in peace to take a picture of it.

This yarn was really freaking cheap, and momentarily made me question my dedication to yarn snobbery. I might have to mix acrylic into my repertoire. I found myself really drawn to this neon purple shade, but fortunately was talking to my mother on the phone at the time whose assessment of "For a baby??? Come on." made me realize that perhaps it wasn't an appropriate choice for a baby. I hate pastels, though, so I think this was a good compromise. Next up, actually making something.

Here's the thing--I keep putting off writing, because I want to be able to actually show you something that I've made. The new and exciting sweater that I started in, oh let's see, the beginning of JUNE is becoming a never ending chore. And I'm starting to realize I'm such a slow knitter because I keep doing crap like this...

So I realized that I had read part of the (poorly written) pattern wrong, and had run part of the branch pattern right up next to the selvage edge where it wasn't supposed to be:

The whole problem area was about three times the length of what you see in the picture. I internally debated for a while--it would probably look better the correct way, but it didn't really matter, right? My inner perfectionist won that round, but what she didn't seem to remember was that whenever you do lace type stuffs, i.e. use yarn overs and decreases that functionally create new stitches, the column of stitches truncates when you get down where it was created. Stops. Does not go down any further. Which I figured out about here:

Which was a hot mess already and only was about a third of the way down to the start of the problem. Why do I do shit like this? When I realized exactly how many stitches I'd have to drop down (around 30) to actually get everything undone, I begrudgingly started bringing it all back up. Here's about halfway:

And two episodes of Top Gear later, we were back to where we started.

I DON'T KNOW HOW TO STOP DOING THIS KIND OF CRAZY. This is why things never get done.