my "somewhat binding" pledge to not buy any yarn this year (while still working) has, from time to time, made things somewhat more complicated. matching up the ideas in my head with the yarn i have in my stash has lead to all kinds of adventures, from striping random colors to crazy guage issues. as i said in the title, sometimes sleeping on a problem helps, but other times... notsomuch.
for example, my brother's birthday is in a week and i wanted to make him the old school nintendo controller kleenex box cover i saw on ravelry. i had some random grey cotton yarn in my stash, so that was good. but then i decided that instead of following the pattern i'd rather crochet it and just use the pattern as a guide. (why did i decided this? i'm still not sure.)
what resulted is what i've taken to calling the frankenbox. a very cobbled together box cover that if i was tugging on it would fit perfectly on the kleenex box, but if left to its own devices would lump and frump and not sit nicely at all.
wednesday night i dramatically threw it on the floor and declared to brian that there was nothing to be done but to rip it apart and start anew tomorrow. i went to bed grumpy at myself for wasting an entire night's crafting time on this ill-planned venture.
but when i awoke it was if the yarn gods were singing in my ears....just get it wet and block it to fit on the box!!! so i did.

and, glory be, it worked!
but that left me thursday morning with a drying kleenex box cover and nothing to take to my thursday morning knit meetup.
again i felt the yarn gods singing to me.... this is the perfect time to start a little "yay your pregnant" present for your sister. (oh- have i mentioned that my sister meghan is pregnant with her third baby!! yay!!) i had a couple of skeins of the super dreamy rowan cocoon in my stash that i knew would be just perfect. but what to knit?
i was running very short on time (as in 10 minutes to get myself out the door) and the first thing that popped into my mind was to make a sleep sack. but i didn't have enough of the cocoon yarn on hand for that. so the second thing that popped into my mind was to knit a sweet little milo vest for baby to wear this fall/winter. so i grabbed the pattern, yarn, and needles and ran out the door.
i got to knitting and realized that rowan cocoon is bulky weight and the milo pattern calls for dk weight yarn... i decide to just make the newborn size, thinking that my family tends to have large babies, baby will be 3-6 months old in the winter anyway, and (as i always think when i'm knitting for babies) babies will eventually be every size, so it will fit at some point.

cut to last night, i'm cruising along on my little vest, but i keep looking at it and thinking... this seems a little bit big for a newborn size... but i kept reminding myself of all the reasonings in the last paragraph and just kept knitting.
eventually though, i had to face facts - "a little bit big" might be an understatement... and i got out my measuring tape and did a little calculating.
ahem... i'd like to think i can blame the squirrel, but turns out the item i was knitting was sized, not for a 3-6 month old, but for a 2-3 year old. hmmmm...... i did the only reasonable thing i could think of at that point to solve the problem and just went to bed. because sometimes sleeping on it helps, right?

well this is one of those notsomuch times.... my vest did not magically shrink overnight. now i am facing facts and ripping it out and then going to ravelry to search for a more appropriate project to celebrate the coming of my new niece or nephew.
-melissa