Little girl blue

Now that I've successfully made a sweater, there's no stopping me now!

I won't say this was easy. Boy, did I have quite the time with this thing. This was my in-flight and on-train project during my European vacation this spring, and if it wasn't for long hours with nothing else to do, I might never have ripped it out and started over as many times as I did (at least 3 from the very beginning, and a couple more times when I started the lace pattern).

My favorite moment with this sweater was on our train back to Paris from Cologne. I was finally getting the lace pattern down but I was pretty certain that I was short one stitch. I was so sick of counting stitches at that point. Not only was it a conversation killer (I still feel a little bad for all the times I told Joel, "Don't talk/Hold on/Just a sec/Shhht.") but also a tedious task when you have over 200 stitches on the needles. But I had to do it, because you can't fudge on this kind of thing. So, in the midst of counting my stitches, the food cart came by. The nice man bent down toward me and asked me in German, then French, then English, in rapid succession, if I wanted breakfast. My brain just about exploded. "Uh..." was all I could utter as my German language brain-file competed with the French one, and English suddenly seemed like a foreign language, and I was trying to keep the number of the last stitch in my head. I was also trying to figure out if I was supposed to take the tray if I wanted it, or if I was supposed to wait for him to give it to me. As a result, my brain completely shut down. I froze. "What language do you speak?" he finally asked (the emphasis is Joel's - I have a different recollection of his question, but to further illustrate the level of embarrassment I was feeling, I'll go with it). I responded, vaguely, "English, French, German, I don't know..." "Deutsch?" "Ein bisschen." Finally the synapses were beginning to fire again. By the time he moved on to the next passengers, I was feeling pretty dumb. It's funny now, of course, but I was ready to cry because I had to start counting all over again and in the end, I was indeed short one stitch. And I was hungry but was too embarrassed to order food.

"Little Girl Blue" popped into my head a few times while making this sweater - most obviously because it's a little blue sweater for a baby girl. I first learned the song when I was young and frequently watched the movie "Billy Rose's Jumbo," which featured Doris Day singing the song to a circus elephant. Weird, I know, but it's a pretty little sad song. And after my own sad little incident on the train, parts of the lyrics really worked for my situation when I switched out the word "fingers" for "stitches": "Sit there and count your stitches/ What can you do?/Little girl you're through (yup, I was ready to quit)/Sit there and count your little stitches (again)..."

Having finished the darling little thing, I am glad I kept at it. I had lots of fun finding cute little buttons to attach to it, too. If you are interested in the pattern, it's called "Lucille," designed by Courtney Kelley. It's a free download on Ravelry. Because I ran out of yarn (and learned that it's discontinued!), I shortened the sleeves and didn't get to the hat.