I joined Weight Watchers tonight. When I told the leader that I wanted to lose weight so that I could knit myself sweaters faster with less yarn, she looked at me like I had two heads.

I've finally managed to drag myself out of the funk I was in after the ThreadBear Open House on Sunday. Now, mind you, I had a marvelous time, as usual. I bought eleven skeins of Koigu and some other sock yarns, and Matt even wheedled me into sitting down at the spinning wheel. But, they are moving forty minutes' drive farther east, so I won't be able to attend Third Thursdays on a regular basis. I'm very, very happy for m'boys, but I'm sorry I won't get to see them and their entourage as often.

When we got home, I started a new project to console myself: the Summer in Kansas Shawl by Two Old Bags, in elderberry Zephyr. I knit on that in front of the TV for a while, then CH and I each had a couple of drinks and did the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle.

Anyway, I am okay now. I finished assembling Haiku last week, but it awaits buttons. It seems serendipitous, since I just got invited to a birthday party for a little girl the right size to wear it. After that, I started Scamp from the Rowan Pipsqueaks book (also the big Rowan Treasury) for my nephew. I had knit the whole back of that, and a few inches of the front, when I started the SIK Shawl.

I didn't explain my Haiku "mistake" very well-- for sixteen rows, ALL the knit stitches should have been purled and vice versa. Since box stitch is reversible, I was making the right fabric texture, but at one shoulder seam, the box stitch sections met like this:

vv**|**vv
vv**|**vv
**vv|vv**
**vv|vv**

while the other shoulder met like this:

**vv|**vv
**vv|**vv
vv**|vv**
vv**|vv**

Today I discovered that I had joined in a new ball of yarn right after the offending box stitch section, so I picked out a row, unraveled and reknit only that section, and grafted the sweater back together. Tee hee. Now the little shoulders match. And I grafted on a sleeve, too, so it it meets the armhole invisibly.

BTW, did anybody else notice that if you follow the Haiku directions as written, your sweater ends up an inch narrower across the back than across the front? The overlapped garter panels on the front are 5" (6"), but the center back garter panel is only 4" (5").

Perhaps instead of actually knitting hats for Christopher Judge (which, as Hope pointed out, would likely end up somewhere else other than on his beautiful shiny head), maybe we should do a picture gallery where we use PhotoShop to take pictures of finished hats from people's blogs and paste them onto CJ photos?

And by the way, what was Christopher Judge doing last night, wearing a knitted hat that said "ONeill" on the front? Does he not have a hat of his own? Perhaps I should knit him a hat. Perhaps we should ALL knit him hats. They shoot in Vancouver and the boy is BALD, surely he has use for more than one hat. I say, let the Christopher Judge Knit Hat Project commence.

I got up yesterday with a burning urge to get Matted and Robbed, so I bundled up my stuff and the Crocheting Husband and trucked on down to Bloomington. Spent a lovely afternoon cranking away on my Haiku sweater. CH finished his first baby blanket with a nice picot edge, wove in the ends, and looked very satisfied.

I'm working on a sleeve now in between thoughts. I finished the body earlier today, but I made a mistake that's really bugging me. I started the last box stitch section with K2 instead of P2, and as a result, the box stitches on front and back don't line up the same way on the right and left shoulders. It's minor, and any reasonable person would leave it alone and move on, but I'm not reasonable, so I may yet have to rip back the last five inches

I think I've unvented the cure for the Knitting Common Cold: the mismatchedness of k2tog and ssk/sl1k1psso. When symmetry is important, I change the way I execute k2tog, as follows: K the first st and transfer it back to the left hand needle. With the right hand needle, pass the second stitch over the first (the one just made). Now transfer the first stitch back to the right needle.

It takes longer, but this maneuver stretches out the left stitch (which lies on top of the k2tog) enough that it matches my ssk very well.

Ahhhh... It's good to be really knitting again. The weather got warm and sticky, so I'm out of the throes of gardening. I finished the blue Regia stretch socks and performed a toe transplant on one of Mom's old socks. Then I dragged out the SBGK. Anybody remember me b---ing about the baby sweater where I misread the gauge, ran out of yarn, and ended up having to reknit the whole thing a size smaller? I finished it today, complete with weaving in the ends. It just needs a button, which I've already bought, but I can't find it. Luckily the baby isn't due for a while yet.

The other night I paged through the new knitty and ended up printing out everything I liked from the archives (after running the printer through half a dozen cleaning cycles to remove the cat hair). After that, I started a Crusoe sock. I am, of course, making it toe-up. I'm using Cascade Fixation, so the heavily stranded slip-stitch pattern still has plenty of stretch.

Also, today after I finished the SBGK, I felt like knitting another kiddie sweater, so I started a Haiku sweater (also from knitty) for nobody in particular, because I had four balls of Rowan All Seasons Cotton in a nice dark dusty purple. I knit the left front and two-thirds of the back today, thanks to an evening of Stargate: SG-1. Which reminds me, has anybody else (Hope, this means you) that Teal'c's chain mail shirt is actually a garter stitch sleeveless sweater?