The parents are coming! The parents are coming!

My parents are coming to visit this weekend. I am very excited about this. There's one problem though, this morning I found out that they are coming a day earlier than I expected and staying a day later than I expected. Which is fine except I have one less day to do all the laundry, clean the guest bath, clean the kitchen, move the boxes out of the dining room, get one of the cars into the garage, and clear space for an air mattress in the game room.

That leaves plenty of time for knitting (and blogging).

I'm still working on the white baby sweater. Shut up! I had to redo the button band three times. That's very discouraging. And now that all the pieces are done and I'm ready to sew in the arms and I think the sleeves look too short. I'm going to ask my mom this weekend. James said it was fine, but James wants me to be happy, so he says everything is wonderful. I'd post pictures and ask your opinion, but the camera batteries died.

I'd made myself promise not to start a new project until I finished one project that was in my knitting bag. I figure that almost-finishing-and-finding-out-that-maybe-the-sleeves-are-too-short counts too. So I started on the Isis Wrap from the Summer issue of interweave knits. (Dead camera, no pictures)

I found some yarn in my stash that I think will work. Of course it has no labels so I have no idea if I have enough. I weighed it and by weight I have enough, but that really doesn't mean much around here. So if I run out of yarn, that's pretty much par for the course. But right now, I'm having a lot of fun.

First I knit swatches. I felt so grown up. I'm actually planning before I start knitting. The pattern calls for 9s but I had to go all the way down to 6s before the stitch pattern looked decent.

You can't really tell in this picture but the largest swatch looks like a fishing net. The size 8s still looked sloppy. I went down to 7s and it looked pretty good, but of course then I wondered what it would look like on 6s. The 6s were magic.

Now the problem of gauge. The swatch is supposed to be 4"x4". Mine is 3.5"x3.5". I did some calculating and figure if I make the next size up it should work out to the right size. We can all laugh about this later when it works out to be some wacky size.

Right now I'm almost done with the back and I have like 8,000 stitches on the needles. Only 3 more inches till I can start casting off. I'll post pictures once the camera batteries are recharged.

And finally, a picture of Maggie. She was laying here snoring while I was knitting. Yes, snoring. Maggie is leaving us this Sunday. We'll miss her very much.