it had to be done

Guess what?

I frogged the steek along jacket. Not all of it. Just back to the first row of the pattern.

Yes. Seriously.

I got about two hours' work done on it before lunch yesterday (about 8 rows) and most of it was looking pretty good. But there was a mistake somewhere in the middle, about the 2nd row in, that I just couldn't ignore. I read on Julie's blog how to fix up a mistake with stitching over the offending stitches, but that was only going to work if I hadn't screwed up an entire section. It just wouldn't go away, no matter how many times I said to myself something like:

"It's ok. It's at the bottom. No one will notice" (I ignored the voice saying, 'yeah but you'll notice')

"A few more rows of trying to get fix it up and you can just use the correcting method Julie posted about" (not for a mistake of this magnitude!)

"It'll be so painful to rip it back. All that work!" (but worth it, right?)

Eventually, what really drove me to do it was that I was going mental with the circular needle I'm using. It's just a garden variety bamboo circular and the join between needle and cable is absolute shite. I have to drag the stitches up over it every minute or so. I threw the thing down, got online and ordered an Addi Turbo from The Wool Shack in Perth. I got express delivery so in two days, when it arrives, I'm picking up the steeked jacket again, and not until then. My fingers need a rest. If I'm in this one for the long haul, it's worth doing it properly, right, with the right tools?

In the meantime, I'm working on socks. Who'd have predicted this outcome, that socks are now my easy side project when just a month ago I was still whinging about how hard they were.

Bells

ps it's raining here! Hooray! A nice, wet Sunday morning is just what we need. Actually a nice wet MONTH would be even better to get the dams filling up again.