The knit-fu had left me for about a week, but it appears to be back. I had a string of disappointments, basically. First there was the Drops cardigan. My swatch LIED!!! Both my row gauge and stitch gauge were significantly off. I noticed this about six inches into the body--so yes, I should've frogged and started again with a larger needle, but for some reason I decided to press on--so I decided to try to compensate for the row gauge by changing my shaping (luckily this pattern does shaping by length, not row count), and figured I would be able to block it well enough that the row gauge would be corrected. Not so much. I was still about three inches short on the width at the bust, so I decided to make it a regular cardigan instead of double-breasted, as intended:


This threw off the collar, of course, and made my waist shaping look very dramatic (i.e. it stands up by itself). I am not so thrilled about that. (Also, JoAnn's was short a button! I think it will look better once I get the last button on.) Anyway, it's okay...but it's not really what I wanted.

Then my cowl came out five inches too wide:


Still pretty, and I still love the yarn, but it's just too big for my taste. I like snug cowls, and I don't like the baggy ones you have to pin closed AT ALL. But guess what--it's SPRING here! I'm putting this away for the next seven months, and I will worry about picking out the graft THEN.

There's also the issue of the baby blanket:


The pattern is Serenity (coincidentally, I have recently started watching Firefly)--and I have no problem with it, it's gorgeous. The problem is that this thing is DAMN heavy. What was I thinking when I decided to make a baby blanket out of kitchen cotton? I have it on two 32-inch needles now, so it's not quite as hard on my hands and wrists, but it's still not fun. It's for my brother and sister-in-law, and the baby's not due until July, but I just want to have this thing DONE. I'm finally done with the main charts, and only have twenty or thirty rows to go (depending on what size I feel like making--it will add about four inches if I make the larger size), but still, it is killing me. I decided to try to do at least two rows a day, and it seems to be working. In the meantime, though, it has been so hard on my hands that other yarncrafting was distasteful, and I started a counted cross-stitch pattern I bought like, six years ago. It's almost done, but I'm currently in backstitching purgatory (in black!!), so I've put it aside and started some socks for Mark for our anniversary. Ah, how nice it is to work with yarn with natural elasticity...

Nothing much new on the singing front. I'm trying to squeeze in lessons and coachings while I can, and probably need to make a quick recording in the next two months... I spent a while yesterday working on a Bach aria, which I'm not sure is working for me.

In house news, we've been getting an intermittent muddy smell from the HVAC. We're still trying to decide if we want to get a bunch of free estimates to figure out what's going on in the crawlspace, or if we should just hire someone independent to evaluate the situation. We don't know whether the problem is with the HVAC or if it's a moisture problem in the crawlspace--and if it's the latter, if the problem is leaky pipes (comparatively easy to fix) or condensation (nightmare). Part of the issue is that we will need to replace the HVAC in the next year, so we wouldn't want to have to redo anything if the problem is moisture. Oh, and of course this all costs money we would rather not spend. Ideally, the HVAC would conk out tomorrow, so we could have it fixed while the weather's nice and file a claim against the home warranty. Nothing I can do about this at this exact instant...

Random thought the other day: the dude I stalked in college ("Cowboy"!) was totally trying to look like Tom Baker's Doctor. For those who met said person, do you get it??



Weird-looking tall dude with big curly hair? This is an insane thought...