Crafting slump

February has flown by in a haze of night shifts, long work days and very little time to relax and craft.  All in all, I won't be sorry to see the back of this month.  It's been cold, dark, wet and miserable.  Made worse by what little time I've had to craft being spoiled by CONSTANT MISTAKES.  I honestly didn't think it was possible to make this many mistakes all in one go.  I guess it's probably a reflection of how tired and stressed I've been when I've had a moment to knit.  I haven't even attempted to make up with my sewing machine yet, there's really no point in this frustrated head space.



I'm knitting a pair of Gamer Gauntlets for a friend of Andrew (who is very kindly paying me for my time), except this is currently the state of affairs, after the third time of frogging.  I know they say you can't make money by hand knitting but that it most definitely true when you have to rip everything out multiple times.  Very frustrating.



I'm also attempting to knit a Swedish themed baby jumper for a friend having a baby in May.  You see it here in it's fourth incarnation - I cannot get these damn Dala horses right.  The first two sweaters had mishapen horses, some with fatter heads or thinner legs than others.  The third I carried the red thread all the way through the back whilst knitting the horses, leading to the colourwork section being overly tight and little bits of red yarn poking through the white.  This is the fourth version and as you can see, the white is too loose where it meets each horse.  I've tried ( in the left hand horse) to fix this by darning the holes closed from the back but it just distorts the colours and looks very unprofessional.  I don't really know what to do now, the hopeful side of me thinks with some clever sewing of loose ends I can close the holes and blocking will help bring out the shape of the horses, whilst the despondent side of me just want to throw the bloody thing in the bin and start afresh with a more simple colourwork pattern.  I thought I was up to this challenge but maybe I'm not.  I might move onto a simpler project for a while and come back to this one in the future, I've got until May to finish it after all. 

For the moment, I might just give up and go back to bed.  I hate crafting sometimes.