Double Entry

There's been a lot of water under the bridge since my last post.

I feel almost like a different person than the one who first took up knitting needles (giant aluminum straights, US size 13) a little more than two years ago.

The physical pain in my hip that came on very quickly once the bone started to deteriorate, and the mental anguish caused by learning that the heart palpitations I'd been enduring for 20 years could have killed me -- those had a profound effect on me.

It's only now that I feel like I'm getting back on the right path, to being the person I used to be. (I left the path for a while, wanting to find something shiny I saw in the distance, thinking it might be valuable, or at least interesting. It turned out it was only a piece of litter, a bit of foil wrapper left behind by a careless person.)

Okaaaay, never give a writer free rein with a metaphor, or it will soon enough become a conceit (definition 3b. "an elaborate strained metaphor").

I spent nearly a week doing no knitting at all. Instead I read through the ten books in Charlaine Harris's Sookie Stackhouse series in record time, considering I lost a day (Friday) to Knit & Chats, which I still attended.

Friday nights at Shall We Knit have been restful lately. Just a few of us there sitting around the big table, plenty of room to see people and what they are knitting, and plenty of mental space to get to know how people think, how they see the world and their place in it.

I'm a bit of a people-watcher, I admit.

But getting back to the topic at hand, since my last post I've been to a Guild meeting, where I got lots of prizes in the raffle -- an embarrassment of riches -- but I don't feel too guilty, because I had just handed in two years' worth of my collected grocery store tapes, all properly processed with the ends cut off and the total showing. Also, by the time my name got called the third time, J. went up to the front for me and I was happy to let her keep the prize.

I have also taken a double-knitting class, taught by Carolyn at Shall We Knit. E. was signed up for the class too, so we went in early and had lunch at MeMe's before the class. I have been able to master the technique of double-knitting to where it's not difficult for me to do, even with all the yarn management that is required. However, I don't instinctively understand how it works, so if something major goes wrong, I can't analyze the problem and fix it. It's frustrating, to say the least.



In actual knitting (not the double-knitting swatch I worked on in class), I have been making some progress. I just finished another feather-and-fan scarf, the one I was knitting in Ella Rae Jaspe Wool.



I've also been working on the ribbed scarf in the combination of Mini Mochi and Koigu KPM held together. It's making such a beautiful fabric, that now I have a different idea of what I want the finished object to be.



Unfortunately, that would mean pulling out what I have done and starting from scratch, reknitting it wider (more stitches on the needle) so I can make a buttoned cowl out of it. (I suppose I could keep what I have done and make a buttoned scarf out of it, but the current knitting is awfully narrow, and I'd rather have something suited to the purpose than just use what I have got.)