Well, I bit the bullet...

Well, here it is. I bit the bullet and finally sunk in the whole fifteen minutes of knitting required to finish my Basalt tank. The reason I'd been putting it off was because I had this sneaking suspicion (okay, certainty) that it was going to come out too big. And, you know what, I was right...

This photo doesn't really do justice to how big is it (not to mention it shows off just how disgusting my bathroom mirror has gotten while I've been busy doing other things). Basically, I swim in it. And please excuse the bra escape...

The weird thing is that I still love it; it was fun to knit, the design is awesome, and I think it would suit me if I'd just made it smaller. I am still very much a fan of this pattern, and I very much intend to try it again some day (maybe in time for next summer, since in Melbourne the weather for tank tops seems to have passed...). That said, it's still going to be frogged because the yarn is too lovely to languish sadly in something that I am, in all honesty, probably never going to wear (the colour! I love this colour so much I could eat it).

I'm not really sure what happened with gauge; my swatch said it was bang on, but then again I wasn't sensible about checking throughout. I have absolutely no idea why I didn't measure the first hexagon after I finished it. Really. It was stupid to a colossal degree. I guess I'm just not long on common sense most of the time... Oh well, that's life, eh? And I suppose it wasn't all gauge either; courtesy of pizza shop drudgery and not enough solid meals, I've lost about ten kilos since I started it. So any existing gauge issues would have been exacerbated by the fact that there just wasn't as much of me for it to cover as there was when I started. Meh.

Anyway, I was having a crappy morning (splitting headaches, essay proposals that won't get written no matter how many times I order my brain to do them, and having to write kiss up letters to apply for jobs that I don't even want do not put me in a fantastic mood), and when that happens, I usually try and cheer myself up by doing something constructive. This was that constructive thing. So now the Basalt tank is finished. I can bid it a happy farewell, and go on to other things. Yay for closure! I was, after all, getting a little guilty about leaving the poor thing kicking around my study like it had been...

Idiocy and new verbs

Stupid Melbourne weather. It decides to crank out a cold day to celebrate the end of summer, and what happens? We all get sick, that's what happens (and by all, I mean me and about three other people I know... so 'all' might be a slight exaggeration, but so what...). So, just before uni goes back, I'm all sniffly and gross. Hurrah.

Anyway, because I'm sick and disoriented, I'm being a little bit of an idiot at the moment. I should be writing, I should be wanting to write, but instead I would rather hexagon. Yes, I have proclaimed hexagon to be a verb. Perhaps that should be 'hexagonning'. I quite like that. I've started knitting the Basalt tank from Knitting Nature, so there's going to be a lot of hexagonning around here for the next while. It's lots of fun so far; it's one of those patterns where you look at it and are totally unsure of whether it's going to actually look decent on you. But it looks like it will be fun to knit if nothing else, and even if it doesn't look good on me, I'll settle for unusual looking. Anyway, where was I? Ah yes, hexagonning:

Behold the fruits of the hexagonning! I'm liking the yarn as well (Jo Sharp Soho Summer DK Cotton); I went and raided Woolbaa (I definitely didn't buy Noro while I was there either) for it, and I'm glad I made the trip. It's nice to knit with, the colour is lovely (much darker in real life than in this picture), and it wasn't too expensive (comparatively anyway - much cheaper than the Rowan Wool Cotton the pattern suggested). Anyway, so all is well on the hexagon front, so far.

Right now it feels like there are so many things I could finish and get out of the way if I just bothered to put in a concerted effort for a short while. My mystery yarn bag only needs me to get the sewing machine out for about fifteen minutes before it will be done. The hat I'm knitting for the Pilchard only needs me to sit down for about that to figure out the top half of the colourwork, and then maybe an hour, or two at the most, of actual knitting to finish. And my story (I love my story, have I told anyone that lately?) only needs about 1-2 hours of sustained effort before the first draft is finished (not some stupid word count milestone but actually start-to-end finished!), but here I am blogging instead. At least I know what will be on my agenda if I leave work early today from being sick (which may or may not happen - husbandy type creature is a hard taskmaster - not to mention amusingly different in his views on when I should take a sickie now that he is running the place I'm working for).

Maybe I'll go hexagon some more...