Still incredibly humid today.

I woke up this morning at 6, and recognized that I was in a compulsive mood (this happens to me sometimes, particularly at *this time*). So I decided to clean the house for my afternoon meeting BEFORE coming over to my office, instead of going home a couple hours before the meeting and cleaning then, as had been my plan. (I knew if I came over here first, I'd be sitting here, unable to focus, thinking "Should I go home and clean now? What if someone calls me on the phone? What if I try to scrub the kitchen floor at the last minute and kick over the bucket of water? What if someone messes up the time and arrives early?"

So my house is clean, or at least the rooms I open to the "public". (The guest bedroom has all kinds of paperwork piled up in it, and the old newspapers I'm still saving IN CASE I still need to pull out some kind of papier-mache monstrosity for VBS this year; my bedroom has a box with all my toiletry items removed from the bathroom - you know, it's a drag only having one bathroom in a house? - and all the knitting projects and magazines I swooped up out of the living room to make it look less cluttered).

Other stuff: Got home yesterday afternoon after my size-rant and looked at the new issue of Heifer Project's "World Ark" magazine, the cover story about African children orphaned by AIDS (in Botswana, 30% of the people in the 18-45 age group are infected). And then, last night, flipping around the tv after book club, I happened on one of those medical programs, where they were featuring the surgeries necessary on a child born with bilateral facial clefts, and all she had to go through.

And ok, ok, I GET the symbolism, all right. I'm going to try not to complain about having the metabolism of a piece of floor tile any more.

I sewed up the front seam of the Dolman Updated sweater. And then, out of curiosity, pinned the rest of the seams for a try-on. I probably shouldn't have, as it was late and I was already in a generally dissatisfied mood.

As it turns out, the sweater does not fit the way I had hoped. Oh, it fits, it's just a lot closer-fitting than I envisioned. Not a "throw it on over a turtleneck or something before running off to the farmer's market" sort of sweater at all. I'm trying to remain optimistic, and think that a judicious re-blocking after it's all sewn, may make it fit better, but there are a few problems:

1.the sleeves are too long. Now, I know, I have proportionally short arms, but they are just a bit ridiculous.

2. the sweater doesn't "Dolman" on me. The sleeves, are if anything, a bit tight. (I should have forseen that. Either I have fat arms, or else many patterns are drafted for women who never do much more strenuous than lift an Evian bottle; I always have to redraft the sleeve patterns on the little summer dresses I sew).

3. the sleeves wrinkle unattractively at the shoulders. I suspect that that might be why they show the model in the pose she's in on the cover - it's the only possible place to put your arms where you don't see that wrinkling. Somewhere, Maggie Righetti is laughing and thinking "I told you so."

4. I probably made a suboptimal size. I went with the 46" size, because I had made Bonne Marie's Sitcom Chic in that size, and it is about the nicest fitting sweater I own. And I had made the Lightning-Bolt Family in the 44" size, and that was just right. But of course, this is a very different design. I should have thought. I should have realized that 2" of ease in a sweater like this won't work that well on me. I should have considered that the most-likely-size-6 model shown in the picture was wearing a 46". But NOOOOOO (as Jim Belushi was known to say), I thought "I'll be *swimming* in a size 50" bust, the 46" will be nice." (Yes, the same exact thing that makes some women buy jeans a size or two too small so they have to lie down on the bed to zip them up.) Well, it's a very body-skimming 46", and I'm not sure I can wear another blouse under it. Which leads to another issue:

5. the yarn I chose was probably suboptimal as well. It's 100% wool, it doesn't drape the same as the cotton-silk blend for the original sweater (which may contribute to the shoulder wrinkles I talked about above). It's kind of scratchy on bare skin (I wound up taking off the big old OBI t-shirt I was wearing because its sleeves all bunched up under the sweater's sleeves and looked massively ugly). And it's excessively warm, or so it seemed to me last night.

So anyway. I'm in one of those moods where nothing satisfies me anyway, so I'm not going to start ripping it out in disgust. Nor am I going to stuff it in a brown paper bag and drop it at the Goodwill, or finish it and mail it anonymously to my (slightly slimmer than me) sister-in-law (she's wool-sensitive anyway, so I don't know if she could wear it). I am going to finish the sewing (things never fit as well when they're just pinned, I'm telling myself) and do the collar, and then consider reblocking - if I do it right, I can take up the excessive length in the sleeves and maybe gain a bit of width to give the thing the proper shape on me.

And maybe when I'm in a less prickly and heat-exhausted mood, I'll try it on and think that the body-skimming shape of the sweater is attractive.

(You know, it's funny. I know in sort of a meta-way that I'm feeling bad, and WHY I'm feeling bad, but it still doesn't stop me from being irritated and uncomfortable and just generally mad at a lot of things today).