If Wishes Were Beggars

I wish I had figured out years ago that purling is knitting. I wish I had a deep and vast knowledge of knitting founded on decades of experience. I wish that I could find the one other idiot knitter out there. Most especially, at least at the moment, I wish I knew how to measure sleeves. You may think this looks like a nearly completed sweater. Were I knitting for an orangutan, you'd be right. That was then.

"Then" was this morning, with the sweater discarded on the dining room table. That would be the morning after last night, when I made John submit to a fitting. I thought I was checking that the neckline wasn't too high.

Understand, I meant the sleeves to be long. I had John try on just the sleeves, checked the length and added the couple inches I hoped would make the sweater wearable for more than this one Spring. I checked them again before I joined them to the body. Whatever doubts and fears I harbored about the fit of this sweater, they weren't about the length of the sleeves. The one thing (two things?) I thought I could count on to be right was (were?) the sleeves. They are, however, about three inches longer than the long I intended them to be. Even with the cuff folded up they come down to mid knuckle. Where I thought my cephalopodic fears were based on the floppy and unwieldy body, they were, in point of fact, based on the length of the arms, I mean, sleeves. Further, they weren't cephalopodic, they were simian.

I am trying to console myself. I didn't like the double decreases anyway. Well, that and they were wrong.

This is due to my apparent irradicable inability to slip a stitch knit-wise. My consistency in slipping stitches purl-wise meant I intended to call these a design feature, an innovation, even. Now, I have been given the "insurmountable opportunity" (thank you, Pogo) to do them right, or at least differently. Because this is now.

Horses would ride.