It’s the official truth. I have a pathological dislike for frogging.

I had this bright idea that I would make the friend I’m staying with a pair of Dashing mitts as a thank-you present, to be given to him by Saturday. So as I was on my way out the door, I grabbed a skein of Boku and the pattern.

I realized after having knit 80% of the first mitt that I had misread the yarn requirements. It requires 82 yards to make one mitt. Not the pair, as I had somehow assumed in my rush to get out the door. I hadn’t made a thumb yet; I bound off right away, a good 27 rows short of the length in the pattern, and figured I’d do an afterthought thumb later on.

I remembered the little note in the Fetching pattern about how they took 1 skein of Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Aran to make, and somehow thought the Dashing would take about the same amount of yarn or less… despite being 9.75″ long…?

I managed to knit the other mitt (also thumbless) to the same size. Then I rolled up the remaining yarn into two equal balls, knit one thumb, and then realized that the amount of yarn I had would only knit a thumb about 1/4″ long.

My knitting notions bag has tons of scraps of leftover yarn in it that I could have used to stretch the yardage. Unfortunately, since I only brought carry-on luggage with me this time, I left my knitting bag at home, and only have a skein of angora with me as my second project–no help there for a Manly Project such as this.

I’m not sure what I should do…
1) Leave mitts as is, claim they are simply fashionable arm-warmers and do not require a thumb
2) Make an afterthought buttonhole and have fingerless, thumbless mitts like the ones from Last Minute Knitted Gifts
3) Rip a few rows to reclaim yarn and then perform afterthought thumb surgery
4) Rip the project out entirely and make a one-skein hat
5) Buy friend a bottle of wine instead

I hate to rip out my cute cables! Le sigh… bedtime now, and I’ll panic about it tomorrow.

So far my New York adventures consist of having a Pinkberry yogurt. I don’t see what all the fuss is about. It just tastes like yogurt. Also, I think it gave me a stomachache.

I also had Korean food for dinner–bibim bap in a stone bowl. The waitress saw me starting to eat without putting the bibim bap sauce on it, chastised me, grabbed the bottle and squirted sauce all over my meal and stirred thoroughly till my bibim bap was blended to her satisfaction. I was faintly appalled.

Also: New Yorkers dress too well, particularly around the feet. The standards are set impossibly high. I wore a pair of nice boots, but they’re hell on the feet. I suggested to my boyfriend that I might wear sneakers to the office tomorrow (I’m visiting a different office, with different company culture, for the first time), and he recoiled in horror and informed me that to do so would be a terrible fashion faux pas, and that furthermore I would not be let into any decent restaurants were I to wear sneakers. I couldn’t remember what my coworkers were wearing. My feet are cramping just at the thought of having to wear my boots again tomorrow–and I didn’t even walk very far, probably only about a mile total.

It stands in stark contrast to Thailand, where everyone appears to wear whatever the hell they want on their feet, because the polite thing is to take off your shoes inside anyway. I distinctly remember standing in the Bangkok subway looking around at a car full of impeccably dressed Thai business people wearing flip-flops under their Brooks Brothers suits.

(Which reminds me. One final note. For the first time, I got a good look at the Brooks Brothers logo in the airport today. Was everyone else in the world but me aware that it consists of a sheep being airlifted by ribbons dangling from a Christmas wreath? Somehow I always associated their brand with dignity and class, not Quiznos-style animal tomfoolery.)