One Crazy Fiber Lady

Oh yes, we have serious trouble. I made a boo-boo with Ballerina. Yesterday afternoon while the twins (and their grandfather) took a nap in the backyard, I moved me and my laptop back inside to watch the Sox. I pulled out Ballerina to work on as I watched the game. I hit the point where the edges of the sleeves were to be bound off in stages, about 2 stitches ever ridge. Good right? Yes. Making progress.

This morning on the train I did a basic count to see how many more repeats I was in for and did some counting. There were different numbers of stitches. Frak. I spent the remaining ride trying to figure out where the heck I’d gone wrong. Just as the train was pulling into the station it struck me. I don’t do the three-needle bind off very often and had screwed up the process at the beginning of each row.

What was going on was that I was knitting together three stitches from each needle to bind off the two, but then on the next ridge, repeating it. But since the third stitch from the previous ridge, which was now the first live stitch was bound off with one from the back needle, I was really reducing an extra back stitch for each ridge. Doh. I started tinking it, but that’s alot of knitting with small needles and grabby shetland. I couldn’t just frog it because the other side of the sleeve is a provisional cast on. While it is grabby shetland, with the way my luck is running, the whole sleeve was unravel bottom up, not to mention it is harder to find those freakin stitches. Soooo…I went back to the first occurence of stupidity and picked up each stitch in that row. I spent the ferry ride on the active side and will hit the other side on the way home.

(click to biggify)

Oh well. Thought I was further along that that

Now for some monumental news of a good type rather than a brain dead knitter type, the twins learned to swim!! Last summer I paid for swimming lessons through the Y where a teacher came to the house and tried to give them lessons in our pool. Most days Kat wouldn’t even get in the water with her. Call it a waste of yarn money. This summer, I opted to skip that (with the ‘rents blessing) and dad has taken to given them basic swimming lessons himself, first getting them to blow bubbles and all that. This weekend there was significant in that they went from jumping into the pool with tubes on and just putting their mouths into the water to blow bubbles to really swimming. Donning goggles, Alex swam from the steps to the ladder. Really swimming. A few hours later, Kat did it too. AWESOME! I watched them jump off the edge of the pool and swim to the stairs. While they need to learn at some point to turn their heads to breath but this is a huge milestone. THEY CAN SWIM!!!!! When they are ready to do something, they really do it. Bravo my babies.

Craft on!