Snail Spirals

I finished the first sleeve on the sailboat sweater last night. I think I've resolved the issue with the blue yarn that I didn't have enough of. I decided to switch the colors and make the orange the main color on the sleeves instead of the blue.

I still wanted to have as much blue as possible, so I divided the remaining blue yarn in half (yes, I completely unrolled the remains of the skein, so it was exactly in half), so that each sleeve could have half the yarn. I then measured out how much yarn 10 stitches consumed, and took that measurement and calculated how many stitches each half of the yarn would produce. Divide that number in half and I got the max number of stitches in each stripe (I wanted two blue stripes per sleeve). Since I knew from making the sunflower sweater that the sleeve is 68 rows long, I knew that a 10-stitch stripe would require 680 stitches. Compare that to the maximum possible from the blue yarn, and Yay! There should be enough blue yarn to make two stripes 10 stitches wide on each sleeve.

It worked! When I finished the first sleeve, I had just enough blue yarn left over to do the cuff, and I do mean just. There is a little scrap of blue yarn that might possibly be long enough to sew the side seam of the body. It's not long enough for even one more row of the cuff.

Perhaps you think that all these calculations and worry are a little obsessive? Well, you might be right. But it's so gratifying to figure something out and have it work the way you plan. It also means that I won't have lots of mostly-full skeins left over. I can look at my tiny leftover length of blue yarn and feel like I am the queen of planning ahead, even though I know that I'm really not, and the only reason I had to go to these lengths is that I didn't plan ahead and buy enough yarn in the first place.

In other news, Emma and I had a really good weekend together. Shaun went to Seattle to do some work at the University, so Emma and I were stranded at home for two days without a car. We had fun reading books, going for little walks outside, brushing the dog, packing boxes to get ready to move next week (!!!!!!!), and baking cookies. Emma had such fun with the cookies. When I started mixing them up, she desperately wanted to see what I was doing, so I put a chair next to me. She climbed right up and stood there the whole time watching. I let her dump in the dried cranberries, though she wanted to eat them, and she really got a kick out of the electric mixer. When the first batch was out of the oven and had cooled a little, we each had one and boy were they yummy! The only problem came when she kept wanting "moooorrrrre!"