Once upon a time, when I re-started knitting, I decided to make Mike a sweater. I had never made any kind of garment or spent any time on gauge, or even sewn any pieces of knitting together, but I would make a sweater, nonetheless. I went to my LYS, bought a pattern for a simple drop-sleeve pullover and some beautiful Mountain Colors 4/8s Wool in a colorway that compliments my husband’s eyes, and dove in.

Well, I soon realized that this beautiful yarn deserved better than my beginner knitting skills, and set it aside for a while to work on other things. I picked it up again during last year’s Knitting Olympics, but ran into a major snag: I was working the two sleeves at the same time, but had picked up the two most disparately dyed skeins so that the sleeves looked like they were knit from two entirely different colorways. I had to put it down again after working on it so intensely during those couple of weeks.

Then I picked it up again last fall and got it done. Alas, it still wasn’t meant to be. Somehow my measurements at the beginning of the project were different from my measurements at the end of the project, and it fit so wrong: it had just enough ease to keep it from being ridiculously tight across the chest, it was short enough to have been classified as a cropped sweater (not so good on a guy), and the sleeves were wide enough for two arms to fit in. Frustrated, I put it down again, vowing that I would start completely from scratch, building an entirely new pattern that wasn’t just a plain stockinette drop-shoulder pullover.

So! Mike was leaning toward an Aran-style sweater. We went through a bunch of books and he chose some patterns and motifs that he liked, I swatched and did a bunch of math, and came up with a game plan.

I started knitting. The Mountain Colors yarn? Still beautiful to work with. The cables? Much more entertaining to knit. The size? Appearing to come out much closer to reality. It really looks lovely.

But there’s a problem. When I bought the yarn, I picked up six skeins — 1500 yards — which was plenty for the plain stockinette sweater, in fact plenty enough that I made him a hat with a 5-inch knitted hem out of the leftovers. The cable pattern is eating up yarn like crazy, however, and I am growing increasingly concerned that even if I pull out the hat (which he loves, by the way), I will still run out of yarn.

And the bigger problem is that Mountain Colors has discontinued the colorway, Midnight Sapphire. There’s none to be bought anywhere. If I could find some random skein, or even mill-end or leftovers from someone else’s project, even if the dyelots weren’t close, I could still make it work. But there will be no finding of random skeins. When I’m done with this yarn, I’m done. And I won’t know I’m done until I’m trying to finish the second shoulder strap and find I’m two inches short.

Cross your fingers for me.