Oh! The Drama

I bet you've all been waiting with baited breath. Will she make it? Will the knitting gods smile on her? Will they recognize her decision to return to the stupid booties for the sacrifice it is and reward her accordingly? The answer is -

Well, no. No. Not really.

My yarn ran out, and I mean ran out, at 15 rows past the ribbing and eyelets, not 22 like the pattern calls for. What to do, what to do? Well. There's the obvious solution, right? Rip out the first one until they match. But why go with the obvious and easy when one can make things convoluted and challenging? I decided on an emergency medical intervention. The first baby bootie was called on to provide a transfusion for the second.

I made it by the skin of my, er, yarn. Barely.

The thing is, after I finished the first one, I had decided that with this yarn, the rolled down cuff over-powered the bootie and had fully intended to rip out 5 rows or so to reduce the bulk. With the transfusion, I got 18 rows each. Close enough. The worst that can happen now is I decide to bring them both down to 17 rows after all, but that means more yarn left over, not less.

A further irony is, I had never intended to finish these. They were supposed to be an experiment to see how much more yarn I would need if I wanted to make a pair of booties to match the BSJ sweater. It quite took me by surprise how invested I became in the outcome.

This left me with one, last dilemma. All in all, these looked a little storm-trooper-ish to me, a shade aggressive. Biker baby booties. "My kid can kick your honor student's butt" baby booties. This pugnacious attitude, happily, was solved with a bit of red yarn and my crochet hook.

I think I may have broken the Curse of the Third Bootie. The only thing left to turn this into a happily ever after story is to decide on which buttons to use for the BSJ and which side to put them on - boy side or girl side.

Full disclosure compels me to admit there were more behind the scenes histrionics. Like when I knit happily round and round the cuff watching my stockinette stitch grow - on the inside. There was figuring out what I (thought I) had done that required me to change direction. There was knitting the second bootie and discovering that the mistake I had made in the first was, in point of fact, all the way back at the foot. Which led to trying to replicate the error (successfully, I would like to point out) on the second bootie so they would match and I could call it a design element. I'm saying it was to give more room in the toe box and nobody will make me budge from my story.

Such emotion. Such suspense. I bet you will never again imagine that I take knitting lightly. Truly, this is the stuff of epics.