Swatching.....

It's rare that I hit in impasse in my knitting. Usually, my queue is so long that I am hurrying to finish one project so I can move on to the next. But right now, well, I am at a standstill. I'm thinking of hosting a knitalong for one of my Ravelry groups......but I'm not quite ready yet. So meanwhile I thought I'd swatch for some potential projects. Trouble is, my swatching isn't going well. I swatched for a little cardi that I'm planning on doing in Noro silk garden. I swatched w/ the suggested US 8 needles, and it came out too big. So, I switched to US 7's. Way to tight. Hmmm. At that point I thought "oh, the size 8's were probably okay after all". So, I cast on and got about 7 inches done on the back of the cardi. But, it seemed, well, floppy. So I measured. Yup, you guessed it, my gauge was off by a lot. Let's just say that I am supposed to get 18 stitches over 4 inches and I was getting like, 16. Not good. So to the frog pond I went. New swatch, on 7's again. (Yes, my third swatch, or fourth if you count the back of the sweater...). I washed this one, pinned it out.............perfection. But now, do I even want to re-start this dumb sweater??? We'll see.......