Life goes on...

This has nothing to do with knitting but I just couldn't pass up the chance to share this picture with you - and to confess that I'm taking pictures of 1 day-old robins in their nest outside of my study window instead of working on the newsletter which should be going out on Sunday. To me, these guys (there are 3 of them in the nest) are just so ugly that they're cute. Note that their bulging eyes are almost the same colour as the "robin's egg blue" of the eggs that they just hatched from.

And while I'm into sharing pictures and confessions, here is another one:

One of the things that I've developed over the years is a skill at measuring, especially measuring people for custom knit sweaters. I figure if someone is going to pay us to make a sweater for their body, it should fit their body perfectly. But this is the 2nd time in the past few months that there has been a serious issue with sleeves - and to make it even weirder, this particular sleeve measurement problem had never happened before in the past 10 years of custom knitting orders (not that other problems haven't arisen over the years.)

At right you will find a picture of the 7 inches that I had to remove from the sleeves of a beautiful sweater that was knit in Esbeth Lavold's beautiful Silky Wool DK. The knitter who made it is a magician at following measurements so it surely isn't her doing and furthermore, I blocked it exactly to size according to my notes. Yet when the customer tried it on the cuffs hung down past her fingertips.

I've rechecked everything and still can't figure out where the math falls down. (The last time that this happened a couple of months ago, the sleeves were 3 inches too short...). The only conclusion that I can come up with is that I believe it's a mystery. Needless to say, the next time, I am going to be obsessive about the whole thing. Perhaps I can borrow the customer's body for a few days and block the garment while they're wearing it.

The woman for whom the sweater was made says that she has always has difficulty getting garments with sleeves that were long enough for her. Perhaps there was a bit of cosmic over-compensation going on.