G. Knerd

Today marked a very important milestone in the Wedding Blanket’s progress.  Today, I blocked not one, but two panels – and since the first panel was blocked already, this means I just got that much closer to being done.

Obligatory bath picture – I’ve become convinced that I’m going to become one of those mothers with tons of embarrassing bath pictures of her kids.

I used the first, already blocked panel as a guide to block the other panels against.  After all, it would kind of suck if I went through all this blocking work, let it all dry, and only then realized that I’d made one set of panels significantly longer than the other.

(Those of you who think I could have used a tape measure or ruler for the same purpose…shhh.)

When I laid out the first wet panel, I got a little worried that maybe the blanket would be a little too narrow – you know, not really good for wrapping around anybody?

I wasted no time, then, in getting the third panel out of the bath – I wanted to see what they looked like all together, to assuage the fears I had about the narrowness of the blanket.  The look of just-been-squeezed wet knitting is something wonderful – somehow I always think it looks full of possibility.

Maybe that’s because it can’t possibly look much worse.

I got it all stretched and molded into the shape I wanted, though, so in no time I was convinced that yes, in fact, this blanket is going to work.  My dear friend is going to love it.  It is not going to be too narrow – if anything, it looks pleasantly wide.

I’m really looking forward to sewing the strips together so that I can really believe it’s a blanket, and not some mindless torture device.  It’s seemed like I’ve knit miles upon miles of yarn and pattern without really making any progress, I’m ready for this to be the magical time where that Knitting Slog turns into Amazing Blanket.

Just a few more miles of border to go, and a couple miles of seams, and I should be good to go.

Although we asked for nothing (or, to be completely accurate, asked to not be given any presents), I can’t say I’m upset that my new Mother in Law decided to get us a few wedding gifts anyway.  After all, she’s a lovely knitter and she understands that, sometimes, you just have to give a girl some yarn.

I’ve never actually used Lorna’s Laces before, as I’ve always considered it just a shade too luxurious to buy for myself, but as a wedding present?  Perfect.  I can’t wait to try it.

The neat thing?  She knows exactly what color to get me, too.  In fact, I already have similar colors from two other yarn brands – I can’t wait to figure out what kind of lovely patterns to put on all of these beautiful yarns.

I’m sure my new husband is thrilled about this proof of the constancy of my affections.  Because there’s no other way for him to interpret it, right?  It’s not like it means I have a yarn problem, or anything like that…

It’s T-2 days until the wedding, the one for which I’ve been breaking my fingers trying to get the blanket done.

I’m not going to make it.

Really, it’s been a valient effort.  The last few weeks have really been a lesson in what’s possible (and what’s not), what point my fingers will start to ache, how long I’ll knit through the pain before giving up for the day.  It’s also been a reminder of why I tend to avoid knitting with cotton yarn – there’s no stretch, there’s no give, and the pain starts to set in rather a lot more quickly than it would if I were knitting with a nice, squishy merino.

But here we are, less than 100 hours from the big event, and I am throwing in the towel.  I’m still going to finish…eventually.  However, I have it on good authority (okay, from a complete stranger) that I have up to a year after the wedding to deliver the present.  I’ve never heard that before, and I have no idea if it’s “true”, but it’s certainly convenient, and I’m not going to question it too hard.

These next few days are for parties, for festivities, for celebrating love and commitment.  The knitting will get finished…eventually.

Even Monkey Kitty agrees.

This morning, Monkey Kitty crawled up on my lap, wormed through my circular needle, and got comfortable.  Can’t you just hear him saying, “Mommy, give it a rest!  This will still be there after wedding (unless, you know, you leave it out and we become mouth friends…).”

So, I might have mentioned earlier that I’ve been on a yarn diet for the past 4-5 years or so.  Not, mind you, that it’s had much of a slimming effect on my stash (although had I not been on a yarn diet for that period, I likely would need to buy a new house right now to hold it all).  But I’ve declared loudly and to anyone that would listen that I was not buying new yarn.  Not at all.  Not any.  Not even if I had a project in mind for what I was about to buy.

How, then, did I end up buying this a few weeks ago?

Well, actually, I’m not sure either.  I could try justifying it by saying that it’s only 9.2 oz, and really soft Faulkland Merino Top, and, anyway, fiber spins down into a much denser yarn, so 9.2 oz really isn’t that much to add to the stash, really.  And, even if I were to accept that horrible excuse – which I don’t – it doesn’t explain the next thing.

That’s 22 oz of Merino Top stretched to 19 microns (or something – all I know is it’s lusciously soft and squishable).  Even accounting for shrinkage, 22 oz of fiber is a significant addition to the stash.  I could argue that fiber doesn’t count – although it totally does – except for the one other thing I bought that day.

Seriously, lead me not into temptation, for I will buy.  At least, somehow, I’m resisting the temptation to dye the fiber and cast on for the socks.  I’m still clinging to the hope that I’ll manage to get the wedding blanket finished in time for the big day.  (Yes, I know it’s crazy too, but you don’t have to laugh at me…)

When last we spoke, I was in a somewhat troublesome state.  I was at the end of the second strip of the Wedding Blanket, and had realized that the beginning of the strip:

Didn’t exactly look much like the end of the strip:

Namely, the problem was that I needed a few more rows to get the same effect on both ends.  Doing more rows, however, would cause this strip to be longer than the middle and also look funky in the tree panel, so that solution was right out.  Ignoring it was also a possibility (what I like to call The Amish Solution), but one that even non-knitters would be likely to recognize.

After sleeping on the problem, I came up with a solution – Knitting Plastic Surgery.

In regular Knitting Surgery, you do something very precise like unravel a few stitches for a few rows to get to a mistake and then knit them back in the right pattern.  In Knitting Plastic Surgery (a term that, according to Bing, has only been used once – by SJ on a post by limedragon), I’m going to claim that one is engaging in Knitting Surgery in order to lessen – but not fix – a mistake.  (Note: this is not how SJ is using it in her comment – what she’s referring to is what I call regular Knitting Surgery.)

Armed with my new plan, I immediately took the four worst offending stitches and unraveled them to two rows past the cable cross.

I then picked up the remaining stitches with the left needle.

Instead of following the pattern (which would here have me knit two rows plain before crossing the cables), I immediately crossed them, thus allowing me to have three rows of plain knitting after the cross instead of one.  That makes the edge noticeably better, without being a hugely obvious mistake in the shortened distance between crossings.

And with that, I’m calling this panel done.  In fact, I’ve been working so hard (while I haven’t been blogging) that this panel is cast off and I’m already almost half done with the third – and final – panel.  It’s amazing what a deadline can do for a project…

I really, really wish I had time to put the Wedding Blanket in time out right now. Also, I probably deserve a smack upside the head.

Why?  Well, this is what the beginning of the current panel looks like.

And, with one row to do before the cast off edge, this is what the other edge looks like.

If you can’t see the problem (the conditions aren’t great and I took the pics on my cell), I seem to need about five more rows in order to make the top look like the bottom. However, I’m only going to get one.

And why do I deserve a smack?  Because (although I’m too tired to confirm this right now), I’m pretty sure I could have avoided this by starting the cable twists two rows sooner.  Maybe.  I might need a quiet room and a lot of graph paper to confirm that.

I think this is a sign that I’m done for tonight.  Hopefully I can figure it all out (and what I can do to fix it) tomorrow.

I’ve got exactly one month until the Wedding Blanket is due.  One.  Luckily, it’s a 31-day month, if it were February I’d be screwed.

Who am I kidding?  I’m screwed no matter how you slice it.  I’ve been knitting on this thing since May, and I’m not quite 2/3rds done.  I’m only marginally sure that I’m more than half way done.

Unfortunately (for the knitting, at least), last week The Blanket Thief and I were in a cabin in the middle of the Wisconsin wilderness.  Given the lack of running water (bathing involves jumping in a lake with soap) and large amounts of dirt, sunblock, and bug spray present in the cabin, however, I felt it prudent to leave the Wedding blanket in the safety of our home.  Which is a shame, because the amount of down time you have in a cabin without electricity or cell phone reception in a week?

I can measure it in feet.  11+ feet, to be exact.  I figured that rope by definition should be durable enough to wash, and if that’s the case then the cabin is a perfect excuse for me to indulge in my latest obsession.  That disk in the center is what I picked up at Old Navy, although now that I’ve worked with it for a while I’m pretty sure I could recreate it from any decently large, pliable, round disk.

Still trying to figure out the patterning, but the experimentation on that has been postponed until after the Wedding Blanket and the cARGHdigan are done.

Monkey Kitty wanted to give you some sense of scale, so I tied him up a bit in the rope.

You can’t see it in the picture, but he was purring hard and kneading the air with his paws the whole time.  Monkey Kitty is truly his mama’s son the way he loves yarn.

In fact, in the time it took me to run down the stairs and back to fetch the camera to take pictures, Money Kitty got very familiar with the yarn – I didn’t catch it on camera, but I came back to find him with the rope in his mouth.  He’s learned that I don’t like that, though, so while I had the camera nearby he resigned himself to dreaming about chewing the yarn mere millimeters from his fangs.

Dream on, Monkey Kitty.  Meanwhile, now that I’m back in civilization I’ve got to get back to that Wedding Blanket.

The Mariners do a Stitch & Pitch event every year, and every year I love it.  The sounds, the sights, the knitters…

Sometimes the home team doesn’t lose, too!

This year, given the pressures I’m under, I’ve decided to do something very risky.

It’s covered in plastic for now, but as soon as I start knitting? This may end in tragedy – The Blanket Thief wants to order BBQ.

The wedding blanket continues.  Just, er…not as quickly as I need it to.

See, when I do some quick calculations, it turns out that I have roughly 754 rows left to knit (not including the border, which I’m purposefully not thinking about in an attempt to hold on to my sanity).  And even if I assume that I’ll be able to knit every day until the wedding (which I won’t) and that I won’t have to spend any time blocking (which I will) and that the border will just magically appear out of the ether (which it won’t)…even if I assume all of that, I still have to knit at least 15 rows every day in order to get this done.  Which doesn’t sound that bad, except that each row is roughly 139 stitches, which means I have to knit 2,085 stitches every day from now until the wedding in September.

Pray for me.

This last weekend, for the first time in my life, I had the overwhelming urge to knit a flap heel.  On every other sock I’ve ever knitted, I’ve done an 
Auto Heel – it was the first heel I ever learned how to do, and it’s the only heel I’ve done since.

And yet, when I got to the point that I was ready to add a heel onto the go-everywhere socks I’m knitting, my first instict was: “I should use this pair of socks to try out a flap heel.”

I think it’s because I’m finding that I actually really don’t like these socks.  Mostly it’s the colors – and what’s driving me nuts, of all things, is the green.  Those who know me will blink a bit when they read that, because green is by far my favorite color, and yet when used in this sock, I hate it. I think it has too much brown mixed in or something.

Poor flap heel – given that I’m predisposed to not liking these socks already, the chances the experience of the heel will convert me away from the Auto Heel are small.

Then again, when you’ve already learned the best way for you to do something, why change?