We have survived

It was a mammoth week in the Atok household this week.  We had exam stress and  nerves, 16th Birthday  Day events, end of school muck-up followed by her leavers dinner and that was just for the daughter.  Daughter was well and truly described as completely knackered. After getting in on Saturday morning she crashed out.  Unfortunately, the rest of us who were just as busy had to keep soldiering on but she was our sleeping beauty who just snoozed on through Saturday and Sunday.  The first week post exams I think the kid is not planning to do anything but sleep and read.

So it will be a week before the reality of the world comes to my 16yr old and then mother will introduce Chores and the necessity of working for a living.  I managed to finish and sew up her birthday cardigan on Tuesday night with approximately 2 meters left of the last skein.  There were a couple of moments when I thought it would be all curtains.  I was so sure that I had foobared that I was starting to think about a contrasting colour for the button band.  I went back to the font of all knowledge and checked out other projects where they had knitted a similar size and used summer tweed.  Yeap six skeins.  Would I have enough left thanks to my minor adjustment of lengthening it.  I counted again and again and even got J to double check my calculations  Seemed like I had actually got it right.  The maths said that I would be ok. It would be close but I would be ok.

It was suck it and see time and I would not be kidding that when I describe the tension as palpable it was.  The old heart was in my throat and I was estimating how many stitches I was getting per foot of ribbing and looking at how much I had left and how much I was appearing to use for each row of the button bands.  It was a sigh of relief and a double check of the pattern to see if I had anything left that I had not knitted.  It looked right but I just had to check cause I had worked myself into a lather about this project.

To celebrate making a non lace project I decided to cast on a shawl.  Yes I was deluding myself that the cardigan was not lace as it was not a shawl. In response to my delusion about having a break from lace I therefore promptly cast on another lace shawl.  I have made 6 lace shawls already this year and it is just the end of June.  I am definitely on track for the 10 in 2010 shawl challenge.  I will have to continue to think about the next challenge for me .

ETA:  To add the photos now that she is consenting to model her cardigan for me.