Like The Picture

When my kids were little and their birthdays rolled around, they would spend a considerable amount of time choosing birthday cakes.  They would pore over cookbooks and ponder various fancy-pants cakes. The cakes always look so perfect in the pictures - festive and fun with tiny frosting details.  

I always told the kids I would make any cake they wanted, but I warned them it probably wouldn't look like the picture.  I'm very capable when it comes to baking, but cake presentation is not my thing.  I can spend hours with a tangled skein of yarn, but I don't have patience for frivolous frosting with sculpting and layers.  The kids have plenty of stories about cakes that were structurally unsound and didn't bear any resemblance to the picture in the cookbook.  But in the end they all tasted great, and that's the most important part.

Knitting can be a lot like birthday cakes.  The picture always looks smashing - from the model to the color to the lighting to the setting. Picture perfect.  Then I start knitting the project and find that I have to adjust my standard of perfection.  The color isn't quite what I thought it would be.  The sleeves are longer than I thought they would be.  (I have short arms, and they're not going to grow.  I should have mastered this one by now.)  My buttonholes came out bigger.  You get the picture.

When I started my Treppenviertel sock project, I was reminded of my kids and the birthday cakes.  I told myself I would go ahead with it, but I didn't expect it to look like the picture.  Looks aren't everything and as long as it fits, that's the most important part.  

I'm working with a misfit skein of yarn that has some funky color that made its way down the leg and then cleared up in time for the foot. I'm considering that a design feature.  Other than that I finished my first sock, and I'm pleasantly surprised. 

It looks like the picture.  And it fits.