Hello! What a weekend! It started off fairly uneventful – gym, crafting, cooking and football playoff watching. I woke up on Sunday morning, walked upstairs into the kitchen and realized that the heat wasn’t on. We have heated floors in the kitchen (pleasant surprise 6+ months into living in this house!), and the floors were COLD.

Went to check, and yup, what I suspected. The boiler was inop*. A few calls around town (not too many since it was Sunday. At 8am.) and scheduled a service call for Monday morning.

*sigh* so. Off to my sister’s to hang out! We packed up some snacks; I packed up my sewing and knitting; Carol vacuumed the shit out of her couch/blankets/rugs while I took every allergy pill I have. And that worked, by the way, her cat didn’t really bother me. And we were there for 6+ hours… crafting and watching more football playoffs. Sucks about the Broncos, but Peyton really does not do well in the post-season.

Ok, enough about all that.

I put together the flying geese I stitched up on our New Year’s craft date with Heather. And then cut into the solids Chelsea from Pink Door Fabrics pulled for me to finish them off. I am determined to not overthink this quilt. It is colorful and bright, perfect for the baby girl it is going to. Which, by the way, is the last baby quilt I need to make for a few months.

And I have a sleeve! It is almost finished. This is for the Strokkur I mentioned in my previous post. I actually ripped this out because my knitting gauge was way way off. My stitches were really really big – too big to follow the pattern. I think I just was not used to knitting with this particular yarn. This second attempt is coming along much better!

Why the sleeve first? Well, one of my Ravelry friends commented that she makes the sleeve first to check gauge, and if she’s spot on, then she’s partway done with the sweater. So I thought I’d try it out.

What is gauge? You non-knitters might be asking yourselves – or more realistically, probably NOT but I’m gonna tell you anyway. Gauge is simply stitches per inch. Each pattern calls for a particular gauge specific for that pattern. Tension variations in knitter or yarn yields different gauge, which can lead to ill-fitting garments if my knitting gauge differs from the pattern gauge. Changing needle sizes usually fixes gauge.

But hey, my gauge is off from the pattern! Even with 2 different needle sizes. I did find this handy online calculator that shows how to modify the pattern to match your gauge. The good thing is that while my row gauge is short by a few compared to the pattern, my stitch gauge (left-right) is spot on. That is a bit trickier to modify than the row gauge. Row gauge is pretty easy to fix – so the website tells me!

I’m almost done with one sleeve, and I’m liking how this is knitting up so far.