The Never-Ending Socks and Other Woebegone Things

So....I FINALLY finished the Noro Kureyon socks I have been chipping away at for years (yes, years - three-ish to be imprecise). I was ecstatic to get them off of the needles. And then....I remembered why it's a bad idea to knit two socks years apart. The new sock is significantly bigger than the finished-first sock. Now, there are a variety of reasons for this: 1. time must have impacted my gauge; 2. needles - I decided that the metal dpns I started out on hurt my hands, so I switched to wooden ones, which also bothered me. Ultimately, I went with a magic loop for the second sock, but since I knit the first sock on metal dpns, it's no wonder that the two are different. Sigh.

They don't look too bad, really. No one knows that they are freakishly off but me (and you). I will wear them and they will be a warm, gentle reminder about why it is somewhat important to finish projects like socks in a moderately reasonable time frame.

In other woebegone news, I have fixed the sleeves of a sweater gone bad. I knit the Shalom sweater last year and it suffered a minor accident wherein one of the sleeves accidentally got felted to itself. I managed to pull it apart and smooth it out, but was then left with one sleeve longer than the other. A friend suggested that I rip back the bind off, knit more length and then full the entire sweater. Excellent idea! The yarn I knit the sweater in is single-ply, so it tends to pill. This would be a great way to solve two problems (sleeve and pills) with one solution. However, when I went back to check my notes for Shalom, I discovered that I had. not. Raveled. it.! Yikes! No notes. Not to be deterred from having a sweater with same-ish sized sleeves, I hand-fulled the longer sleeve and now they look about the same.