Recipe for disaster

1) Make a very manly looking Odessa hat (sans beads) for your guy, but then rip it out and re-knit it bigger, buying one extra skein of the same grey yarn beforehand, just in case the bigger size uses up too much extra yarn. Finish hat and mail it to Canada.

2) Look at said skein of yarn, which has now become part of the stash. Decide to use it in something rather than returning it or letting it breed in the stash box.

2) Browse the internet for ideas; find the corrected version of the child's placket neck pullover (go here for a photo - its the one with the 'E' on it), which takes the same gauge yarn. It is knit in the round, so it should knit up fast, with only a little finishing.

3) decide to make the jumper more fun and eastery-looking by putting an intarsia-stitched panpan on the front of the jumper. Convince yourself that this won't actually be all that hard.

4) take perfectly good panpan grille (its french) and re-do it so that it fits the jumper size you need.

5) buy the rest of the yarn, and the needles specified in the pattern.

6) realize that in order to get the intarsia pattern to work, the jumper cannot be knit in the round. decide to split the jumper at the start of a round, so that there will only be one seam. Rationale: knit the jumper flat up to the top of the chart, then sew the seam, put it back on circulars, and follow the rest of the pattern as written.

7) make a swatch. make another swatch on bigger needles.

8) cast on and knit 8 rows of the evil seed stitch (it hurts my wrists and takes me ages to do cause i always mess it up half-way through)

9) find out that the recipient of the jumper is growing like a weed, so it will need to be one size bigger if its going to end up being worn for more than a month. Frog the 8 rows and cast on again.

10) knit to this point*:
*note: this will involve tinking between 5 and 10 stitches at a time, on several different occassions, and three whole rows on another occasion.

11) Realize that there are about 5 minor mistakes in the rabbit, and one giant one: the pattern was supposed to be 51 stitches across, and was centred to fit on a front section of 58 stitches. the rabbit is now 53 stitches at its widest point, and totally off centre. Convince yourself that this is okay, cause you can just 'move' the rabbit by turning the jumper a bit, after the seam has been sewn and before the sleeves are attached.

12) Knit two more rows and then stop, since you are now considering frogging the whole thing and starting again.

13) Stop knitting and blog instead.

Although I like the way this jumper is turning out so far, the stitches are really uneven in places, mostly where I've carried yarn across the back - like on the top of the rabbit's left foot (on the right) where there is a vertical stripe of 2 stitches of light grey. I didn't want to use a separate piece of grey for that, so i just carried the yarn across the back. but now i think it looks bad. which means it is going to irritate me forever... which means the sooner I fix it the less I will have to reknit later on. and if fixing it means ripping out, then I guess its all in the name of making a nice gift, right? How demented would it be to swiss darn the whole thing anyway?

any thoughts? (please, someone save me from my perfectionism!)