by my estimation

the pile is shrinking

At times this marathon square knitting project has felt unending. I knit and knit, the pile of squares grows and grows, but the amount of yarn remaining never shrinks. Until now. All the grey yarn has been knit up, only about 1000 meters of evergreen, rust and gold remain. There's a tiny ray of light at the end of this tunnel!

At this point I'm prone to rashly say something along the lines of ... "Should be all knit up by tomorrow"... but for the record, my timing estimates are terrible. Things always take days, even weeks, longer than I think they will. When I worked as an estimator I calculated times using multipliers for each person. I'd look at a job and say "hmmm, this looks like a two hour job so Doug (multiplier: 0.8) will finish this in about an hour and forty minutes, whereas Tom (multiplier:1.1) would need about two hours and ten minutes." Apparently my own multiplier should be about 2.5!

I suppose it's probably in my own self-interest that I'm so unrealistic about how long things will take. After all, would anyone really knit socks or shawls if they really thought that through?