WIP Wednesday: Stripe suspense

What's more suspenseful than the final wickets in a cricket match, or a budding romance between strangers exchanging lunchtime letters via Tupperware?  Starting a row that you aren't sure you have enough yarn to finish.  Between watching cricket and seeing a movie on Sunday, I finally answered a question that has been plaguing me since I ordered the yarn for my Affection-ite: would I have enough gray?

I made the order from KnitPicks while they were having a sale.  Sales are good because saving money is always good, but they are also dangerous because yarn can sell out from under you.  I originally had wanted to get two skeins, or 100 grams, of all three colors just to be on the safe side.  The system would only let me order one skein of the dark gray Hawk colorway, though.  After much anxious project stalking, I determined that I might/probably/hopefully have enough for the first contrast color in just 50 grams.  But it was going to be close.

And oh boy, was it.  I considered just not doing the final trio of stripes in the short row section.  But looking at the hollow remains of my yarn cake, I thought that maybe, just maybe, there was another row in there.  I tried to quantify those chances by weighing the yarn, but once you get to such a small amount, my digital scale, which is about twenty years old, ceases to be entirely accurate and there was little difference between the weight of the yarn and the margin of error.  I did the right side row of the gray stripe on Friday night and looked anxiously at the little pile of yarn.  It's so hard to look at that and judge how far it will go, isn't it?

Thankfully, my dreams were not plagued by visions of running out of yarn halfway through the row.  And the next morning, neither was my waking self.  I completed the wrong side row with let's just say a few feet to spare.  Now I'm just a few more rows away from being finished with the final section.  I would show you a picture, but the stitches are so scrunched up on the needles that you won't really get the full effect until I cast off.  So the suspense continues!

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