I seem to go through a rather brainless period lately and I do not really know on who or what to blame it. Staying at home with children doesn’t seem to help me personally to keep my brain fit and healthy. I guess I should look for some kind of activity… say cross words or…. knitting. Isn’t that supposed to be one of these activities to keep your brain active? Clearly not true over here.

And sadly I seem to make more mistakes when I am particularly pleased with my own cleverness.

Example No1 “The Dress”

I am currently sewing a dress for myself. Well, I try to.

I always pre-wash new fabrics and put a little old cleaning cloth in the washing to see if the colour of the new fabric would discolour other items. Clever, isn’t it. Except if you put several new fabrics in at the same time.

So my lovely orange flowers on white background were suddenly orange flowers on a yellowy-peachy background. Slightly disappointing but still pretty enough to be used.

I placed the pattern on the fabric and was extreeeemely pleased with myself that I not only managed to put them so close together (loosing 5mm of the edge of a dart) that I might actually be able to make a skirt from the left overs but also that I remembered for once to transfer all marks onto the fabric,…. shaking my head smugly about the silly notch in the middle of the front-fold… If I cut there into my fabric I would have a hole in the middle of my dress…. silly.

Once I finished cutting out everything super carefully, I realised that I had placed them wrongly, with the front cut in half instead of one piece and the back as one piece instead of cut in half. I guess, I could fix it by adding a stripe in a contrasting colour which would “cut” the front in two halves but that would mean that I had to buy new fabric so I just bought the same fabric again and I’ll not make that mistake again ever….hopefully

Example No2: “The vest”

My mum requested a sleeveless vest for my dad with “a fun design, maybe stripes”.  As usual I skipped the rather useful planning and calculating before ordering and ordered a main colour and a few single balls in other colours…. which was then rather tricky to put together.

I guess that is something I will never learn so I should not count that as a mistake anyway.

At least, I did a proper counting job and counted all my rows and wrote down all the numbers on little scrap papers which I placed carefully around the house.

So I was really surprised when I made the buttonhole band and then the armhole band and things clearly did not match.

It took me two hours of counting again and again until I actually found the mistake. And I had to rip at least one day worth of knitting.

Lesson learned here: Don’t bother counting rows if you are actually to stupid to do it properly.

And last but not least, I was again very proud of myself that I remembered that I will have to take care on which side to place the button holes as my father is not exactly the cross dress type of man who is used to wear his buttons on either side 🙂

So, I finished the vest, asked my husband to wear it for the picture, wrapped it carefully, sent it to Austria and waited for the thank you call.

Which came a couple of days later. Beautiful, super soft material, nice colours, fits perfectly but by the way, the buttons are on the wrong side….

At least that is easy to fix 😉

Next time: Yarn over and their English equivalentS and why it is actually really useful to watch you tube videos only half way through and with the sound switched off.