The Stripes of Doom

Hello. I have been knitting a stripey Baby Gro. I seem to have been knitting it for decades. And it's really not Milla Mia's fault, I have been doing this knitting thing for a long time now and should have known it would start to suck the very soul out of me.

It'll be a pretty baby-gro when it's finished, and frankly I have a lot of  love for the turquoise yarn, but I should have realised that a 3 x 3  stripe in stocking stitch on a garment which is frequently only 2.5 inches across can be mentally challenging:

Yarn changes?, we got 'em!

It can also be challenging to the dexterity of the knitterly hands to juggle needles, attempt to change colour without leaving a huge loopy first stitch AND try to weave in as you go* while remembering to k2tog or skpo at the same time.

Also  it's in an odd number of rows per colour so the keeping of a tally sheet is (for me) SUPER important as some of the decreases are on a grey row and some are on a turquoise row, no mental cue of a colour change there to remind me - just don't lose that Post-It note! Oh...

Sometimes I didn't remember to do the weaving bit, but having ENDS, I tell myself,  is not as bad as having the wrong number of stitches** is it?:

Escapee ENDS of frustration

I am not over the moon about the seams, if I'm honest:

Seams, I would like them to be somehow different

I don't know why it's taking so long, because I honestly haven't been distracted at all, and really I haven't got a quarter of the way through a Windward (I'm blaming the Yarn Harlot for that one) when I should have been doing STRIPES. And I may also have only been doing some beginnery noodling on my new bass guitar,  a little bit...but you know, not so much...

So I still have to do the hood, the ribbing, with (argh) BUTTONHOLES and then sew on ONLY TWELVE (laughs hysterically) buttons. 

Here is the current status of this garment, looking somewhat like a curly rag (because that's the other thing, stocking stitch, of course, curls like a bugger until you sew it all together):

Not far now.......help me.

I may weep, I may crawl into the Talisker bottle at some point, but it will get done, as the little one it's intended for is already growing like the clappers. And it will be worth it in the end.

*Well, thank god I know how to do that at least. But, ah, I hear you say, why not carry the yarn up the sides? Well, I have (after the sucky stripey shenanigans) to pick up and knit ribbing all round the thing. My perfectionist streak is already struggling with the not so  deeply neat seams, let alone pick ups on top of carried strands]

**this may have happened once.