Medicare For All

Knitting Friday on Saturday

Note: This site is acting wonky so I'm posting before the photos are in. They will follow today. Promise.

(You can tell I started this post yesterday. I always feel so guilty when I miss a day. Then I read blogs which start "Sorry, I've been away for three months.......")

(Written yesterday)
Well, I'm writing this in the a.m. but my photographer is at work and when he returns he has promised to take me to a new diner. (Yes, I am sucker for good diners - that's why I'm a Jersey girl!) So, I don't know when this literary masterpiece is going to be posted since I promised pictures last Friday and reneged and I'm not going to do that again.

It's been a wild week. I "fired" a volunteer a few days ago and today she sent me a e-mail saying she was resigning. Cripes! I'm back in 7th grade!

But knitting-wise, it's been even more wild.

The Shalom cardigan is no more. That is really one neat cardigan and was working up with such a professional finished look. I was happy, happy, happy. And then I had to do some normal repairs, like a twisted stockinette column which had a purl stitch a few rows down on the right side. Normally, you would drop the stitch down to the error and pick it back up to the needle, twisting as you go.

The first time I did this, the stitches spread out after the repair so that the tightly spaced pattern "winged out" in the area of the repair. OK, I thought, my error, I can rip back. Which I did and then continued on. After working another increase section in the pattern, I'm tooling along and I see another wrong stitch a few rows down. Bingo! The same thing happens. I rip down to the problem and the stitches fan out.

That's when I realized that the increase rows were the problem. You increase about every third stitch on those rows unlike a to-down raglan which increases 8 stitches every other row,. Here you do large increases in spurts followed by a patch of even knitting. This works fine unless you have to rip back to fix an error. Then you get the fanning out of the stitches. So, I guess the experience level of the Shalom cardigan should have been "Godlike."

Back to the frog pond it went. But all was not lost. I decided to cast on like the Cali Cardi:
http://www.flyhoney.com/flyhoney/the-cali-cardi-pattern.html with 50 stitches, followed by a seed stitch collar of an inch and one-half followed by an increase to 70 stitches, Then I started on a typical top-down raglan. At this moment, I'm finishing the second half-sleeve and the picture of it at right is unblocked. This pattern worked up very well and next week, I'll post the generic pattern.

(Continued on Saturday)
One of the reasons, this post is a day late: I met another diner meal laced with MSG and deciding to make my drink of choice with the meal soda and not coffee (which dulls the MSG effects) I returned home for a two-hour nap.

Now let me digress and discuss naps for a second. I know my nightly sleep pattern is shot to hell. I know I can feel tired during the day because of this. I know I can fall asleep at ungodly early hours (whenever possible) in order to compensate (which also messes me up more since I'm awake a 12 a.m., bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.) However, the fatigue which comes from my allergy(?) to MSG is completely different. It's a fatigue which tells me that unless I get a nap immediately, I will die. Yup, it's that bad. So, you say: Why do you eat at dives which use the stuff? Unfortunately, all types of restaurants use MSG. At this point, I'm down to one diner with fantastic coffee and one Chinese buffet as restaurant choices. End of digression.

Last night, I ordered $50 worth of lace yarn from Knit Picks. Well, really $51.47 which was the closest I could come to their "$50 and free shipping" offer. I wish I had a mirror to see the angst I feel when ordering online. I seem to be able to spend money in actual stores but I am so torn when I shop online. Perhaps it's because you can't walk away from a web "deal" with anything but a promise of goods to come. But I overcame my angst and got some lovely lace on sale because I love lace. Never thought I would say that. Yesterday I was wearing my first shipping lace purchase from Knit Picks (when you only needed to spend $45.) I made it into a 3-dc cluster shawl which is so light and airy and, I think, pictured in an earlier post. And I thought: This is so pretty. And light. Why do I not have more of these? And now, I will.

Enough rambling. Thanks for reading. I did get long-winded - or else I just wanted to practice my typing skills.

Here's a pattern for you to look at. It probably my next project:

http://www.menwhoknit.com/community/?q=node/3036

There is no picture of this shawl but I have 400+ yards of lace and this pattern's even row is knit which is plus if I decide not to block.

More on this next week.

Happy knitting.