The pleasures of a back porch

I'm at my parents' house in Jersey, blogging from the back porch. It's very nice out here, listening to the neighbor's water feature and thanking the heavens that the kids on the block aren't back from summer camp yet.

Another good thing about coming back home is that I have time to work on my mother's Traveling Cables Cardigan. It's a Karabella pattern for Aurora 8, and whoever wrote it had a wonderful idea for an interestingly constructed, elegant pattern. Whoever checked it for technical errors decided that they were overworked, and put their pet bunny in charge of this particular pattern. Every "K" and "P" in the intricate, row-by-row pattern is reversed. It is ridiculous. There is always the possibility that I am reading the pattern completely backwards, but at this late date (I'm working on getting the final piece done) if everything is completely backwards then it'll all fit together anyhow. I just really want to know what, if anything, they were thinking!

I started making my mom this cardigan a while ago. It fell by the wayside because it was too complicated for the school year. I made a lot of socks during fall semester. Fast, easy, and a lot of attention from everyone else in the classroom. But now, coming back to it, I realize how much I missed cables, and Aurora 8 in dusty rose, and knowing that in a few days, my mom will have a new sweater that is all my own work. I don't usually do that well, knitting for others. A scarf is about the best I can accomplish. Anything else and I start feeling very unhappy, as if the knitting is work, not enjoyment. I like knitting for myself and then giving the item away. I did that with my Jaywalkers. They ended up being too small and tight for me, so to my roommate they did go. She loves them. But this is for my mother, and so far, even with the hiatus, it has done nothing but make me happy. Once I have reversed all the "K"s and "P"s, of course.

Back to the knitting!

Harry Potter 7, Inner Border 2

I'm in upstate New York, at the BF's grandmother's house. It's very nice here, a great place to sit and recover from my Harry Potter binge last night. I made my best time ever through one of those behemoths, and I did cry when it was over. I swore I wouldn't, too. I was very satisfied with the ending.

While we were all waiting at B&N for copies of the book at midnight last night, I
worked on the shawl some more. The rows get longer, but at the moment they are mercifully less complicated. The more I knit lace from memory, the more it is possible for me to do and think about other things. Like sit in a corner at Barnes & Noble and listen to one's friends debate. I'm almost ready to join a new ball of yarn and it is causing me great consternation. I have never done it before! Oh, no! Which online tutorial shall I use?

I'm knitting! I'm knitting!

At the behest of my roommate, I'm updating! She says it's because she doesn't want me to lose interest. It is my hope that the real reason she wants me to update is that this blog is drawing her closer and closer, ever more inexorably, to the yarn and needles teasing her from nearly every corner of the apartment. Or, perhaps, (and this is far more likely) she thinks that having me update more frequently will induce me to knit more frequently, and thus make the amount of yarn in the apartment recede. That's probably it.

After a hiatus of several days, I am knitting on White Fir again. I had made a mistake on two of the six sides, and it was causing me to not knit and become depressed because I wasn't knitting. It is a strange phenomenon, that after so short time I was affected so deeply. I was lethargic, sleeping late, uninterested in anything besides blinking... This might also have something to do with the sore throat I had. This sore throat, for the record, was clearly the fifth horseman of the Apocalypse, and we should all make preparations accordingly.

Now that I'm knitting again, I'm reading, writing in my paper journal, and am a much more pleasant person to be around, according to my BF. I solved the mistake in Inner Border 2 by simply ignoring it on the plain round and k3tog in the appropriate spot on the patterned round. There are still two extra yarnovers in there, but that's all right with me, and it's going to be my shawl. Striving for perfection is one thing, but being a whimsical creature and finding nothing wrong with having a few little errors that give the thing character is another.

There is White Fir, in all her smushed together glory. I am actually much farther along than this picture suggests, which means that she is even more smushed together on the needles. The pattern calls for a 24" circular, and while that doesn't seem so bad at first, I would have switched to a 32" when I started the second Inner Border pattern. However, I can't seem to find Susan Bates Quicksilvers in size 7 anywhere on the web, and it isn't strictly necessary. I think it would make the knitting a little more pleasant, but this way I'll be even more surprised when I'm finished and stretch it all out.

I'm very happy to be knitting again, and especially on something so beautiful and complex. Even though the charts look daunting, I'm memorizing each pattern repeat and knitting from memory on most rounds, only rarely looking back at the charts. This is the first time I've ever done that, and it makes me feel so capable. Connected, as well, to all the people who have done it and continue to do so today.

Am I really going to...

...ask my father to drive me to B&N tonight so that I can copy down the next few instructions for the Fir Cone Square Shawl? I own the book the pattern comes from, (Folk Shawls, by Cheryl Oberle) but I left it in the city, never suspecting that I would have so much time to knit during this mini-trip home. Wouldn't that be ridiculous? Wouldn't that be outrageous? Wouldn't that be completely normal behavior for a knitter? If kept away from my yarn and needles for too long, (say, an afternoon) and confronted with a bookstore, I usually make a beeline for the knitting section and spend quality time reading books I already have at home. My father explains this quirk by stating, simply, "She misses them."

The Fir Cone Shawl is constructed by knitting a center panel and then picking up stitches all around it for the inner and outer borders. There are 12.5 repeats needed to make the center panel. I have done 11. Given my usual knitting speed, especially when confronted with relatives who both like to talk and understand my need to be twiddling sticks and string in my fingers at all times, the likelihood is high that I will be stranded without a stitch to do. I could always start something new... I think I just heard an ominous rumble in the distance. It won't stop me, but at least the universe tried.

Some of the relatives have returned! Time to go not pace myself!

At long last...

I have a blog! Now, to be fair, no one except my roommate knows about it just yet and I don't have a digital camera, so the content of said blog is going to be necessarily minimal until one or more of these things changes. But, in spite of all this, I have a blog! All I can say for myself is, "That wasn't hard, now was it?" Eventually I hope to have a blog on my very own domain name. That would be delightful, except that I have no idea how to use blogging software or to post anything to a real live web page. This will have to do for now.

I'm planning on using this blog to talk about knitting, most of the time. Or knitting most of the time, as I seem to do. I have a lot of projects going right now, and since it is summertime, a lot of time. I'll also probably talk about books, food, living in New York City, and having a lot of things to do. We'll see how it goes! I'll post again later with a list of works in progress, a vague introduction to my stash, and perhaps even a photograph or two!