Rip It, Rip It

I should have seen this coming.  It should have occurred to me that something would go wrong with my Christmas knitting other than not getting everything done in time.  There I was, making progress, sailing right along in naïve hopefulness but then - an unforeseen problem.  When I laid out the Christmas project I’d made for my daughter to do some finishing on it, I realized that it was just ugly.  Seriously.  Not ugly because I’d slipped a stitch or made a technical error.  No, it was ugly just because the garment itself was ugly.  The picture on the pattern looked so cute.  However, after carefully following all of the instructions to the letter, the thing didn’t look much like the cute little picture.  Instead, it was kind of like when you see those tantalizing pictures of a perfect Big Mac on TV but when you go and actually buy one, the bun is mushy and there’s no sign of the two all-beef patties.  What a colossal disappointment.  There’s no way I could give this sad thing to my daughter.  She’d think I don't love her.

What to do?  What to do? 

So I spent three agonizing days looking through other patterns to see if I could find something I could get done in the limited amount of time I have left (keeping in mind that I still have some other stuff to do too).  The yarn I bought for my daughter’s project is very nice yarn, so scrapping it all was not an option.  I finally found something suitable so I frogged the original project without too much hassle and have begun the new pattern.  I will be working frantically on it and the other few things I have to do over the next, what, ELEVEN days until Christmas.  Oy…

On a brighter note, I finished the one bulky sweater a couple of days ago.  I still need to get buttons for it and for two other projects, but I’ve cast on the second bulky sweater on my list and I’m about half way through the yoke.  I’d have finished the yoke last night and divided for sleeves but I noticed an error on one of my increases and so had to tink back four rows except I only got three rows done because I was too tired to tink any more… 

So today I will work madly on the new project for my daughter while she’s at work.  The house is pretty quiet so far, so hopefully I’ll get a lot done.  I love how the sun shining in through the patio doors acts as an instant sedative for our goofy dogs.  They all just kind of pass out in spots of sunlight.  After Christmas, I may just join them…

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Have you ever had a project not live up to your expectations?