I ripped it out!

Remember when I started the green sweater. Yeah, it was a while ago. I still consider myself a really slow knitter but I'm coming to the conclusion that it's not that I'm slow, I'm just easily distracted.

I just heard from my friend "T" and she timed herself knitting socks. She is finishing an inch an hour! So if your average sized sock is 17 inches from top to toe, it takes her 17 hours to knit one sock. I'm probably knitting about the same speed on socks. The problem is that I never MAKE a whole hour or several hours together to knit. I might grab 15 minutes at lunch. I may knit while looking at my emails at home in the morning (obviously moving along a bit slower, since I have to stop from time to time to work the mouse). In the evenings lately I'm just too tired to focus on following a pattern.

Now, back to the ripped out sweater.

I apparently don't do gauge stuff very well well. I could have sworn I had gauge, but when we traveled to West Virginia at the beginning of February, the sweater was just at the waist line point. I was doing the ribbing on the back. I held it up to my ass and waist and realized finally (without denial this time) that I was something like 3 inches short of making this thing fit my body (around, not in length). I held it up to my friend Paige, who is smaller than I but it was too small for her, too.

Then her very slim (model slim) college-student daughter floated past and I slapped it up against her ass. It fit. Perfectly. I suggested at that point that the sweater might have to be for her.

But here it is March and I had tacked on several more inches to the thing, made a mistake and ignored it and kept knitting. But I'm discouraged. I want a sweater to fit me. I have enough yarn (I bought more than my original calculations called for because my mom (the master knitter) told me to.) She's brilliant, my mom, is.

So this morning, I remeasured my gauge.

On 4.5 needles with Wool of the Andes yarn from KnitPicks I am getting 5.25 stitches per inch and 7 rows an inch. Before I thought about it too long, I ripped out the whole thing. I balled up the yarn (loosely, so it doesn't loose it's elasticity). And I got out the Knitting Without Tears book by Elizabeth Zimmerman. I looked for ideas in Big Girl Knits by Jillian Moreno and Amy R. Singer.

I like the fabric I was getting at that gauge with this yarn and those needles. I'm going to start over and use a different pattern. One made to measure for ME! And I think I'm going to knit it in the round.