We'll start at A. Cast on flush excitement because you've used stash yarn to make a baby jacket for a friend of the family using some very domestic pattern which is appallingly written out of Family Circle magazine. It was meant to be simple, cheap, and effective. You've had this beautiful Rowan 4Ply Soft sitting in your little bag for a few years, waiting for a suitable project, and here it is. You calculate guess wildly you have enough yarn to make it to the end.
B: Around about now, the first doubts creep into your head. Perhaps you wont have enough.....the plans start hatching, for how this can be rectified given the pattern and the amount of wool you have. Oh, it'll be alright.
C: Round about now you start having a few more serious doubts, as you start the new ball, and, I should add LAST ball of yarn. You are suprised at how much yarn went into such a small sleeve. Plod on regardless.
D: It's time to seriously start making some contingency plans because the hysterical laughter of the 'I Told You So Monster' living in your head is becoming quite loud and is starting to get a little annoying. Rifle through the stash bag (bag??? since when was it a bag, it's been boxes for ages, deal with it, and stop referring to it as a bag) again and come up with clever cunning plan, along the lines of, we'll just not do the other front flap, and we'll do a stripey sleeve. You've reconciled yourselve to how the front flap will go, and how you can make that look like a 'design feature' quite easily. The stripey sleeves are causing you some concern. But it'll be alright, I'm sure.
E: About now, you've realised with some shock that you are indeed about to run out of yarn and not make it down the second sleeve at all. You will have also tried to make stripey things work, and you will have knitted up swatch pieces in other similar yarns to try and rectify the sleeve and yarn and stripe crisis. You will have vaguely thought about emailing someone to get more yarn.
F: You have now run out of yarn, and you will now go and grovel to kind people and tell them your silly story and hope they don't laugh at you hysterically, and ask them to go into London and buy you more wool. Oh, and a copy of Heat magazine. And some Gap socks for the boy. You wait anxiously for the return email, and you nearly run through the computer screen to thank dear Jane for agreeing to your requests.
G: Then dear Jane comes through with the goods, and the jacket can re-commence.
However this isn't the end of the story, because there's still the finishing of the jacket to go, and then the putting on of the 'design feature' front flap. But that's another story.
