Dude...that was close...

Apologies now for the total crapazoid photo...used my laptop camera and the lighting pretty much sucks in here at night. But I just needed to share this...

If you're a knitter, you can probably figure out the significance of this shot, but I'll elucidate anyway so you know the whole story.

I finished my Citron tonight, which I knit out of my own handspun (with fiber from Tempted Yarns). If you've knit Citron, you know that there are five ruched sections, each of which double your stitch count until you decrease again for the area between the ruched sections. But then the last section you do is the ruffle, which also requires you to double your stitch count. So, if you do the pattern as written (meaning not doing fewer or more sections), the ruffle is worked on 540 stitches. DUDE. Yeah.

When I finished the fifth ruched section and the decrease section that followed it, I weighed the idea of adding a sixth ruched section, but I feared I'd then run short of yarn and end up with a dinky little ruffle, which would look funny. So instead I went ahead and did the KFBs for the ruffle and decided I'd simply knit the ruffle as long as it took to use up all of my handspun. The pattern called for 11 ruffle rows before binding off. I ended up doing 23.

Near the end, I tried to decide if I could get one more row out of the yarn before binding off. I did my default estimating process of stringing the yarn out along the length of my working stitches, tripling it and then adding some extra to be safe. I was able to do that twice and had maybe one more length left over, so I felt confident that I could get a row plus my bind off out of my remaining yarn. (I'm pretty sure bind off rows use more yarn than regular knit rows, at least that's my hunch.)

Heh. What you see me holding in the photo is what was left after I bound off the last stitch. Twenty-four inches. Or, in fiber-speak, less than a gram. (Seriously...it will not even register on my digital scale as one gram!) DUDE!!

I was starting to sweat there for a while, because I was soooo close to the end, but all I could think about was having to tink back 1,000ish stitches because I'd miscalculated and run out with, say, ten stitches to go. (And no, there wouldn't have been enough yarn from my cast-on tail to have used to make up the difference! LOL)

I love when I can use up all of the handspun in a project like this, but this was just a little too close for comfort! ;)

Better pictures of Citron (and me...yikes!) forthcoming after blocking and a good night's rest. (Citron and me, respectively. ;) )