Summer Knitting and Other Things

Someone needs to slow things down; summer seems to hurtling by WAY too quickly. My June was completely taken up by an online Genealogy class, which, while it wasn't too demanding, did have a fair amount of reading required, as well as a final project. I worked up a brochure for genealogy researchers on resources in our little community, which was fun and satisfying. This is something we'll be able to use day to day, when we get questions from library patrons. Along the way, I got a guided tour of a gem of a little historical society, in Eagle, the village where I work.

And they have quilts... And did I have my camera with me? No, of course not.

This has been a week of saying goodbye to a much loved and valued library co-worker. She's landed a great job at a Milwaukee hospital, with FULL BENEFITS. I have to be happy for her, but I'm going to miss her so much. We took her out to dinner last night, and about cleared the restaurant with our raucous behavior. It was a group that ranged in age from an 80-year-old down to high school-aged kids. I just love that we're all friends.

OK, back to fiber arts. I can announce a knitting breakthrough. It's great to have a problem if you can then figure it out and then sail onward, as Elizabeth Zimmermann would probably have put it..

So I've amassed a huge amount of sock yarn over the last few years. Sock yarn always seems like a nice souvenir-y yarn shop purchase. Pretty soon, you are drowning in the stuff... I've also bought sock yarn, got home and realized it was 100% wool--not my best choice for knitting actual socks, as it might show wear faster. So that yarn has always ended up in the black hole of never-going-to-be-knit.

How to use this yarn? I've been hunting for small projects, actually worth knitting, using fingering weight yarn, that might help me blast through the sock yarn surplus.

I stumbled on the Karen shoulder shawl from Indiknits.

The cast-on is a bear--it's one of these operations where you start with about three stitches and pretty much beat them to death. If you've ever attempted one of these cast-ons, you'll know *exactly* what I'm talking about. After several false starts, I finally came up with an approximation of what the pattern described and I was off and running.

This particular shawl has a good run of stockinette stitch before the lace patterning begins. But once the lace starts, as with any triangular lace shawls, the knitter is working without a net--you can't effectively use markers to delineate a pattern repeat when you're increasing the stitch count all the time.

On my first triangular shawl, I stopped and counted stitches at every. single. half. row. I've lost patience with that sort of diligence and nowadays just launch off, sometimes to my own peril. And so it happened with the Karen shawl--the patterned knitting didn't seem to be hitting the right marks as I began the second pattern repeat. I knit and ripped three times and then just cast the whole thing aside. That was about two months ago.

It bothered me though, and twice more I picked up the project and couldn't puzzle out where I had made my fatal error.

A flash of insight--it became plain that the curse of a forgotten yarnover...or two...had caused the problem. Thank goodness I have learned how to fake a yarnover! Once again, I'm sailing along on this pretty little scarf/shawl.