I'M BACK! Didja miss me?

Okay hi yeah, there was a teensy hiatus there. I got a little sidetracked by graduate school. Yes indeed, I am going for my M.A. in English Linguistics with a side of Transcultural Studies, and it's going about as well as you can expect for someone as distractible as I am. Suddenly everything is a squirrel. A shiny one.

Because of grad school, I'm not designing, not taking on any challenging projects, and not buying new yarn (except for Aldi sock yarn, which is from Aldi so it legally counts as groceries, not stash), so there hasn't been a lot to blog about. But I am still knitting, because see above re distractible. I have found that I can't sit still for all the reading I have to do. I'm jumping up every two minutes to get a snack or check the mail or clean something or see if a thing I haven't used in five years is still where I remember it being even though I don't need it now, unless I have something to knit, preferably plain stockinette in the round. This information will be salient later.

Another thing that I probably shouldn't have signed up for because it takes time away from my studies is I volunteer at the refugee center, teaching recently arrived women how to knit and crochet. Quite a few of them are pregnant, so over time I have developed a baby sweater pattern that involves a lot of plain stockinette and uses up my impressive collection of Aldi sock yarn. So efficient! I have no idea - really none - how many I've made by now, because I tend to give them away as soon as they're finished, but they look more or less like this:

Aaaand a number of my knitting friends have requested the pattern and I keep meaning to publish it, but agh. I'm having such a hard time getting started. My therapist says I'm afraid to get started because I don't have the time it would take to get it perfect, so I should let go of the perfectionism and just get something up, and I can always fix it later.

So this here entry constitutes a promise: I will put up at least a version of this pattern for advanced knitters (i.e. I don't need to explain how to cast on or increase) this week. And you my audience are invited to ask questions and make suggestions and otherwise help me make this pattern better, even - dare I whisper it - accessible for a broader array of knitters? Because it was never my intention to design difficult things.