they ask to behave, i pay them no mind

First: happy Mother's Day! This is my mother, and this is her (finally finished!) sweater. This sweater was the subject of many a beleaguered posting...first I decided that the pattern wasn't good enough for me and changed the construction of the garment completely (OCD front-to-back agreement wouldn't have been perfect). This is what I do NOT recommend doing. You will be sorry! Then I nearly ruined the poor thing by trying to graft garter stitch purely by logic (again, do NOT do this, you will be sorrier). Disgusted, I had thrown the whole thing in the bottom of my knitting basket, hoping for a miracle. When I did decide to pull it out again, I RAN OUT OF YARN. This was the last straw, and bona fide despair set in.

I began to think of any alternative...a contrast collar would have looked tacky, no collar was terrible, I could maybe dye the sweater...like I said before, my solution is/was to send it to the basket. Get thee gone!

A miracle happened a few days later. A miracle. A scraggly little half-skein of this yarn turned up in my closet...it hadn't been kept with the rest of my Cotton Classic and was stuck in a knitting bag where I had previously kept this sweater. Oh, the joy was unimaginable when I finished the collar and wove in all the ends...and there was a sweater! A cute sweater, too! Even after all of that. I'm kind of ridiculously lucky.

It looks really good on Mom, and the color is right, too. :) Now time for cocktails in the yard!

why am i here and who are you?

Take a look at this girl, blithely knitting away, not a care in the world: she had the brilliant idea of knitting a whole sweater during a cross-country road trip to New York City.

WHAT WAS SHE THINKING?!

Because here we are, two years later. That "easy, quick!" sweater was still sitting in a tangled mess in my knitting basket, neglected. Naturally, during the course of aforementioned road trip, I objected to an instruction in the pattern. My obsessive-compulsive, perfectionist self balked at knitting a sweater side-to-side because the increases and decreases would not look identical! This is the point at which most people would move on and accept the VERY slight difference between these features, but no, not me.

Instead, I do what I normally do: ignore the problem, stash the sweater away, and sulk until I forget that it exists.

But the obsessive-compulsive side of me always wins. Always. Because this was an unfinished project! We can't have those! I just pulled it out and began the process of repairing/ripping/trying to figure out what that vacationing brain of mine was thinking all those months ago. I think I have a plan, so full speed ahead, time to finish this sweater once and for all!

READER POLL: should I overdye this sweater once it's finished? The color is a lot brighter than I had intended. I'll knit some swatches and dye those first, of course, but please tell me what you think!