Not the Post I'd Planned to Write

 So I was expecting todays' post to be a very celebratory one because I thought that yesterday I would finish the Finnish jumper for the OH. All I had left to do was graft the underarm stitches and weave in the ends and bingo! the job was done. 

Well things didn't go according to plan. Grafting live stitches is not my favourite job, nor is it one I'm particularly good at, because whenever I can I substitute a three needle cast off instead. So I don't get the practice. Three needle cast offs are not particularly useful for underarms though. I went wrong twice. Once was relatively easy to put right. The other wasn't. It took some heart-in-the-mouth cutting, some knotting, and some fudging, but in the end it was done and won't, I hope, unravel. 

Thrilled to bits I called the OH through, told him the glad tidings and got him to try it on. Well, try trying it on, because in the event, despite my having cast off with a needle a size larger than the one used for knitting, it wouldn't go over his head, because  ( I thought) the neckband cast off was too tight. I was not thrilled, especially as I had cast off in rib, and that's a real beggar to take out; and that was after the ten minutes it took me to find my woven in end and tease it out. I took out the cast off, and two more rows, and redid them with a needle one size larger again - and with much the same result. By now I was almost crying with frustration and I balled the whole thing up, threw it in the bag where it lives and said I was never   going to look at it again. 

Of course I will. I need to take out the whole neckband and the decrease row just underneath it and redo it with rather more stitches. Hopefully the OH will have the tact not to complain about the neck being loose once I finally finish it. I'd already had a monumental struggle with it, because when it was almost finished a few weeks ago he didn't like the neckline ; too low, too wide, so I had had to delve into Google and rummage around You Tube to find out how to recalculate all the yoke decreases so that it would end up high enough and narrow enough for him. Only to discover, as mentioned above, that it is in fact too narrow. 

I know Mr Kipling (not the cake baking one, the poetry writing one) recommends that you 'meet with triumph and disaster, and treat those two imposters both the same' but I don't have it in me. I don't get carried away by triumph, but disaster floors me. I had a hot chocolate and a whole bag of mini eggs, to help me recover my equilibrium and actually only succeeded  in making myself feel sick. And  obviously it did nothing to put right the inadequacies of the sweater neck.

It will be a while before I can face this mess once more but in the meantime, because we've been feeding birds regularly for a few months and because it has snowed the last couple of days, we now have something a bit more exotic than the usual murmuration of starlings arriving by the sunroom window to be fed. 

Not a good picture but he was running away at the time, having seen me through the window. I'll try for  abetter one another day.