Pride and Punishment

Austen and Dostoevsky should have collaborated, or at least dated. But, no - the internet tells me that Jane died at the tender age of 42, just three years before little Fyodor was born. No dating for them. ANYWAY, back to the topic - my own downfall, my Pride and my Punishment.

PRIDE: After I blocked Nuclear Pumpkin, it was fantastic. It fit me perfectly. On Saturday, I wrote the previous blog post in which I bragged and bragged and boasted on and on about my greatness, and then I wore the sweater Saturday night and basked in the admiration of my friends. I wore it to work yesterday and bragged and boasted and showed off and then...and then...Nuclear Pumpkin started doing Something Weird. The springy wool started contracting. It started getting shorter and shorter...until it was FAR shorter than it was BEFORE I'd blocked it. By the end of the day, it was sticking out around my body like an orange flying saucer. I should have anticipated this, because as I was knitting it, I could see that the wool wanted to contract in length. I figured blocking would fix it, because it wasn't pulling in all that much. I did not anticipate that it would just shrink, right on my body, while I was wearing it. Lesson Learned, for the 135th time: Wool is Strange Stuff.

(Oddly enough, it didn't shrink horizontally. In fact, it got bigger. I guess that's why Blugly's blocking worked out so well; I just wanted to expand the ribbing horizontally, while the length was already perfect.)

PUNISHMENT: None of this is as catastrophic as it might sound; I'm just going to rip out part of the sweater from the bottom up to where the decreases end, knit back down without increasing, add a little length and redo the hem, which I wanted to redo anyway. The hardest/slowest part will be ripping it out...and I may have already done that part last night before my family could stop me.