What day is it again?

I worked through this weekend, upgrading a critical system and staying camped out at my desk for an ungodly number of hours. It was a fraught couple of days, with minor glitches getting in the way of the upgrade, which itself ran through pretty much as planned, but those glitches meant I lost hours sorting them out. So all in all, the weekend was long, stressful and incredibly tiring... The sort of tiring where at the end of the day I can barely string two words together in a coherent fashion. Not good.

I'm reliably informed that today is a Tuesday but to be honest I'm beginning to lose track of days. Part of my thinks it is a Wednesday, but I've been warned that Friday could be a long time coming and I have a whole lot more work to get through before then.

Having been at the office over the weekend and returning home in a poor state for anything more than eating and sleeping, has meant I'm not really progressing anything at the moment.

But... I have been slowly cracking on with my first attempt at a seamed knitted garment, a simple waistcoat (Ravelry Link) from 101 Designer One-Skein Wonders.

Here it is as of last Monday, just so you can see what the fabric looks like.

Click on image to see a bigger version...

This waistcoat is a very simple knit, using something called a mistake rib, which is basically a 2x2 rib knit on an odd number of stitches. It is very easy and doesn't require much thought, although I have from time to time found myself knitting a proper 2x2 rib as my attention wonders.

I finished the knitting part of this on Sunday night and last night, I bravely tackled the side seams using matress stitch. Now, I've used matress stitch before but never on knitted fabric and I thought I did a fairly good job. When I held it up I couldn't see the join unless I used my fingers to feel for it by squeezing the seam, which to me was pretty much the idea. Picture a very happy me.

Until I tried the sewn waistcoat on, at which point it appeared to be far too small for me.

I'm trying to temper the disappointment at this stage as I persevere with adding a crochet border, which I may beef up a bit adding a second row rather than just the one required by the pattern. So far, the border is stretching the edges of the knitted fabric (as I expected it to) quite a bit, but the main body of the waistcoat isn't stretching with it, so the whole thing has a warped and lop sided thing going on. The yarn (James C Brett Marble) is lovely, but acrylic so I can't go near it with steam which means I plan on waving a cool iron over it when I'm done. If that doesn't work, then I'll try washing it and pulling to shape...

I'm considering this a learning experience.

No finished pictures as of yet, because I'm concentrating on trying to sort it out rather than waiting for good light and photo opportunities.