I Call a Do-over

Sometimes I really need to remember to remind myself (ha!) that it's worth it to take my time. Way back before Thanksgiving, I finished up a new hat, wrote up the pattern, and sent it off to my tech editor.

I'll admit I was rushing a bit because I wanted to get it to her before December and all the craziness I knew was in store for us in the first week. When she got her comments back to me over the weekend, I had a moment of reckoning and realized that the sizing was completely off. While the numbers all worked out, I'd come up with the sizes based upon the gauge I thought I was going to get rather than the gauge I actually ended up getting, so everything was too small. So on Monday I decided to start from scratch and rewrite the pattern for actual head sizes. Of course, I was out of the green I used for the contrast in the original sample, so I had to use something else. I rather like this new combination, even though it wasn't my first choice.

I finished up the colorwork section on this new sample last night, and tonight I expect to get through the crown. I'm also planning a matching cowl (with the colors reversed, provided I have enough purple), and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I'll be able to get both patterns back to the tech editor by the end of the weekend so that I can publish them by the end of the year, thereby getting me patterns number 99 and 100 in my portfolio and achieving my last design goal for the year.

I'm posting this to prove to you that designing often involves as much ripping and redoing as it does knitting -- and also to show you that it takes time to get things right! Even though I've been knitting for most of my life, there are still plenty of times I don't get it right on my first try. And even when I'm the one coming up with the pattern, I can still manage to screw it up.

When the design knitting is done, I'm going to take a bit of a break and do some knitting for pleasure, at least for a couple of weeks. I haven't completely decided on what projects/yarn I'm taking to Florida, but chances are good it'll involve at least some dishcloth knitting because this yarn bonanza showed up in yesterday's mail:

It actually doesn't look like that much here, but that's 23 balls of Knit Picks Dishie that I ordered when they had a big sale on it Thanksgiving weekend. My supply of kitchen cotton has gotten down to only small leftovers, and I actually like Dishie a little better than the typical big box store cottons, so I figured I'd stock up. There are at least two dishcloth/washcloth patterns I want to make, and I frequently get the urge to cast one on, so it'll be good to have a small stash of the stuff. Or at least that's how I'm justifying the purchase to myself!