Up in smoke

I had a dream to finish, over the weekend, the two pairs of fingerless mitts on the needles. One is the lovely pattern I designed in teal acrylic, looks like this:


Unfortunately, I forgot what needle size I'd used for the first one, before I started two other projects...the upshot of which, is that when I made a second one, it was wa-a-ay smaller than the first one. Well that first one was huge, so I frogged it & have since finished it with the same needles used for the "second" one. The other pair on the needles is a slightly tweaked version of Raging Fingerless (Gloves? Mitts? brain is swiss cheese & this bit seems to have slipped away!), which is an F. Pea design. My version looks like this:


These are the second pair I wanted to finish, as the first one (pictured above) was well on the way to being done. But with the delay in getting the teal ones finished, all I managed on the brown pair was to finish the first one and start to cast on for the second--I didn't even finish the cast on, as I fell asleep with the needles in my hands! I was using Pie's Long-Tail Purl cast on alternately with a regular long-tail cast on, to make the cast on edge K2P3. It's pretty slick, but I have to look at her pictures & instructions every time (see above, re: swiss chesse for brains). I still haven't started on a repeat customer's request to modify some of the granny square stockings I'd made. Remember these old friends?:


Yes, they're crocheted. Generally, they need to be bigger. This can be accomplished by frogging the stitches that are holding the two sides together & adding a row of double crochet, or a couple of rows of half-double crochet, to each side before rejoining. It's a good thing I've still got lots of Christmas-y yarns left.

We've been around the bush three times with the &^%^#& auto finance company. I'd set up a payment online, gotten a confirmation, then a week later they started calling about the "delinquent" payment! Meanwhile, we received a statement showing the payment credited. They kept calling anyway! The bank traced down the payment, and spoke to the finance co rep, and she "admitted" the payment had been received. So we know they are bad actors, and if they call us again we'll tell 'em off. But I'm quite pleased with the service from the bank!