Knitting Problems

The Problem I've had a longer relationship with this fair-isle tank top than I have with any man I've dated. It's been with me for three moves and five Christmases, always at the bottom of my knitting basket. It's pretty obviously unwearable - the neckline is unfinished, the bottom rolls up, and it's for that very specific weather pattern that leaves your midsection cold but your arms too hot. But the yarn is soft to the touch and I still like the color combination in the fair isle pattern. I even found part of the pattern mapped out in an old Excel sheet. So I picked it up over this past Christmas to see what I could do with it now. The biggest problem is I only had a partial skein left of each color with no labels or tags, and again the yarn came from an inherited stash. I ran out of the first skein halfway through knitting the second sleeve. Hubris led to 4" purple cuffs, and then I didn't have any more purple to continue the fair-isle pattern. Easy come...

There's a picture of my dad that used to sit on my mom's bedside table - in the nebulous lore that is my dad's past, I would place it somewhere around the time he took a break from college and lived in Colorado, getting by teaching other sometime-college-students to ski. In this picture, he's leaning forward into the camera lens with a grin that tells you how perfectly aware he is of the power of his fluffy mane of 80's hair, and he's wearing the platonic ideal of the perfect fisherman's sweater.  There are two points here -  first, this is a man with standards, and second, I have wanted to knit this exacting man a perfect fisherman's sweater for the past 15 years. About 20 years ago, I had a babysitter who could knit. If my memory is at all reliable, she was a woman of no discernible age or facial features that would sit on our sofa while we watched Pixar movies on VHS and crank out stockinette stitch color-blocked scarves like it was nothing. Fast forw...

  Maybe a sweater?