Yarn Along

Life has been a little crazy on the farm lately, at least on my end of the farm.  For many months of the year, I rarely venture outside, and the ground is hard, solid, and tucked under a bed of fluffy snow.  For a few even shorter months, the ground wakes up and produces life (food, flowers, animals) that comes at you faster than a Mentos in Diet Coke.  I can’t catch all the life thrown my way during these intensely colorful months, but we do pretty well.

My knitting got put on hold, not because I never had time to sit down and do it, though.  I got to the edging portion, with over 700 stitches on the needles now for this shawl.  The edging was a ribbing pattern I wasn’t quite familiar with, and increases that needed focus to accomplish.  Fundamentally it isn’t a difficult pattern.  It’s actually quite simple.  It’s just I needed to concentrate without interruption for over 700 stitches in a row.  That kind of pocket of time just doesn’t exist in my life right now.

So knitting stopped, and I was not happy about it.  Finally, yesterday, I locked myself in the women’s locker room of the YMCA, away from my kids and in the corner so no friends could see me.  I got the majority of this “set up” row done, and once I recognized the rhythm of it, I was able to finish it up after the kids went to bed last night.

So now I’m in the clear to finish up this lovely shawl.  I honestly think I did it wrong.  I think I increased on one side way too much.  Since this is a massive project using lace-weight yarn with tiny needles and I’m just finishing up the edging there are only 2 things I could do about my thoughts that it might be much more curved than the pattern shows:

1) Rip out 2 months of work, grumbling, and start over, grumbling.

2) Call it a “modification,” take fabulous pictures of it, and hope to make it to a “Modification Monday” post by Knitted Bliss.  One can dream.  It doesn’t look bad.  It actually could be pretty cool.  I’ve decided it will be pretty cool and I am determined to block it to my will once it’s off the needles.  We shall see.  All bunched up on my circular right now, it’s tough to tell how it will all turn out.  Talk about a mystery knit!

I have been focusing so much on my garden, and doing so little knitting that my muscles were so after knitting 2 rows of the edging.  I realized that my little callus on the inside edge of my middle finger on my right hand (a callus that is a constant when I’m knitting hard) needs to be reformed.  I feel like an athlete out of shape when it comes to my knitting muscle memory.  It’s a real thing.

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For reading, I’m going over a history book.  My kids love, love, love Susan Wise Bauer’s history books Story of the World and we are about to study the middle ages this next school year.  Someone told me that Susan Wise Bauer also wrote parallel history books that go into much greater detail that is aimed at adults instead of children.  So I took the bait, and started reading The History of the Medieval World, a few pages a night a few weeks ago.

I love history.  There are several history buffs in this house.  Not only do Knut and I LOVE history books, we’ve managed to pass that love onto both Silje and David which is kind of miraculous as they rarely like the same thing.  The younger kids haven’t caught the bug yet.  So this has been a fun read, though I’m not sure I will be able to finish it.  It’s just so much.

My favorite story so far in this book is the coronation story of Shapur II who was king of Persia around 325 AD.  He became king a month before he was born.  His father died when his mother was 8 months pregnant and the Persian noblemen and priests actually crowned the queen’s belly king.

I cannot get that picture out of my mind.

So what are you knitting and reading these days?