Four days to gold

I had some great ideas for the Knitting Olympics this year. Instead of starting a new project, I was going to drag out one of those big projects that have been marinating in the back of the yarn closet for (sadly) years and make it a goal to get at least one, or more of them finished.

But then Stitches West showed up on the calendar and a friend who was volunteering to help with Buffalo Gold yarn asked if I was interested in doing a lace sample piece for them (because she knows I like knitting lace). Naturally I said yes. There was never really any deadline discussed, but we both agreed I’d try to get it done in time for Stitches…except that they didn’t get the yarn to me until last Thursday, which meant I’d have just over a week to finish it up.

No problem, I said. I am a fast knitter, I said. Stitches weekend is at the tail end of the Olympics, so I’d just change things around and make this my Olympics project. A week is lots of time!

Ha ha ha.

A week is a lot of time, yes, but when you discover on Wednesday, five days before the self-imposed deadline, that your gauge unblocked is what it should be *blocked* (I usually don’t worry so much about gauge for sample pieces since they’re not being fitted to a particular body), and you might run out of yarn, panic starts to set in.

I did the only thing I could do. Thursday night after I got home from work, I ripped the entire thing out and cast on from scratch. Since it’s still All Furlough Fridays All The Time at work for me, I knit furiously on it pretty much the entire day on Friday. I took it with me to Stitches on Saturday and spent a very long time weaving in a gazillion ends (I really hate weaving in ends). And then Sunday, with the Closing Ceremonies looming ever nearer, I sat down at the dining room table with the directions and the yarn and worked and worked and worked.

The buttons bands are crocheted. I am a very, very slow crocheter. For one of the colors I literally had to weave in all the ends where I’d used it before, and then tie all the little pieces together so that I would have just enough yarn to finish the very last color repeat. They didn’t send me buttons so I had to do a lot of guesstimating to work out where the best place would be to set the buttonholes. Rupert did his best to try to steal my yarn, over and over, until during the last few hours, Richard very kindly camped out behind me and did nothing but distract curious kittens so that I could finish in peace.

We didn’t have the TV on (too distracting) so it’s possible they’d already doused the flame, but considering that I did not get the yarn until a week into the Olympics, and that I had to rip it all out and start over FOUR DAYS before the end, the fact that I finished at just about the time the TV schedule said the ceremony was to end means, to me, that I made it.

These aren’t the best pictures, because I took them this morning and I was tired and in a hurry and not in the mood to try to stage some kind of lace photo shoot, but here you go. Lake and Forest Vest, made with six different colors of Buffalo Gold Lux.

Four days. Phew. I earned this, baby. Oh yes indeed I did.