Rip....Rip....Rip....

That was the sound of me ripping six inches off the bottom of a sweater.

See, I've been reading a lot of Elizabeth Zimmerman's books lately. From them, I got the brilliant idea of turning swatches into hats (or hats into swatches) - because swatching kills me. All that wasted effort - no amount of good reasons will make me happy about swatching.

But a hat, I can get into. So I knit this hat you see above, using some directions in the back of the holiday edition of Interweave Knits. I wanted to accomplish two things - learn how to knit Fair Isle, and design a sweater using the EPS system.

The pluses:
I learned how to knit with both hands, carrying a color in each.
I made a hat in my daughters' school colors.

The minuses:
Everything else. Now that I'm done I hate the pattern. And why, why, why did I believe the directions when they said to knit the first four rounds plain? I knew it would roll!!

The worst part is this:



I started the aforementioned sweater from the bottom, with a hem for turning, and this color pattern above. I hated the pattern almost from the moment it was done, but I persevered. And today, with the rest of the sweater done, I still hated it.

So rip....rip....rip.... I now have three tidy little balls of yarn, and six or so inches of stockinette to make up on the bottom of the sweater. Sigh.