It is indeed a purple mystery.

Happy New Year's Eve, everyone! This is really sad - it's after 9pm on New Year's Eve, and I'm blogging. Not only am I blogging, I'm wearing navy blue socks, dog-hair-covered black yoga capris, and a stained sweatshirt from my first half-Ironman, I have no makeup on, and my hair is all straight and sticking to my head from when I swam early this afternoon. Sheesh. And I call myself a member of The Sexy Knitter's Club.

Anyway, let's move on to the Mystery of the Malabrigo Shrug:

Back in September, Mike and I visited The Knitting Tree while we were in Madison for Ironman. I bought some wonderful Malabrigo to make a shrug that the owner of the store, Melissa Matthay, had designed. The colors are Purple Mystery and Lettuce. Because of other knitting must-dos, I didn't get to it until yesterday. To my horror, the pattern is wrong. It's very vague and there are typos - not little typos (well, there are some of those too), but big honkin' ones. Like "K1, k2tog, k8, yo, k until 11 sts, yo, k8, k2tog tbl, kl" for the left front. A) those are the same instructions as for the back. B) there aren't enough stitches to do that whole thing on. No schematics, no number of stitches you should have at any given point, no increase instructions given for the left front when there were increases on the back. (I've never done a sweater that has increases on the back but not on the front. Have you?) I quickly became obssessed with this shrug and was determined to figure it out ASAFP. I changed my workout schedule for today so that I could be home at 10am and call the store when they opened. Someone (a man, or a woman with a really husky voice) took my number and said that "Jackie" would call me back in a couple of minutes. He/she also told me that Melissa no longer owns the store, so I'm assuming that Jackie bought it from her. I stayed home until 1:30, but never got a call back. My guess is that they figured there's not a huge rush to call me back since I don't live in town and won't be frequenting their store very often (if ever again - not because of this incident, but because I don't foresee us having a reason to be in Madison, WI again). Or maybe they just got really busy. Either way, they forced me to do something I've never done before: write the pattern sort of on my own. Egads! I'm soooooo not a creative person - I'm very anal and can follow directions very well, but when it comes to coming up with ideas on my own, I fall short. I went on the assumption that the instructions for the back are correct, then backed into numbers for the left (which became the right somehow) front. I also used this picture as best as I could. I've sewed the right front to the back, and so far, so good.


There's some striping on the sleeves and the edging, which I'm going to use the Lettuce for.

Isn't it pretty?

Lettuce hope that I can forge on and make this shrug as wonderful as the one I tried on in the store back in September and wanted to roll around naked in. (If you've ever touched Malabrigo, let alone knit with it, you'll understand why I said that.)