Tuesday, April 01, 2008

Knitting @ 100kph

Yes, I am here, and I even managed to start, knit, and finish something over the busy weekend, I've got an update on the baby blanket, showing progress. The weekend was fun, the dinner was amazing, huge bowls of kai moana delivered from kitchen to our tables at Fleurs Place, Moeraki. Kai is Maori for food, moana Maori for sea, so sea food. The bowls held so many tempting treats, cockles and mussels in the shell - hot and steaming and tender, all sorts of smoked and cooked and marinated fish. 8 of us to a table, and 4 large bowls and platters of food, and that was just the entree ... but enough talk of food. The weekend was fast and fun, at one point I felt that tight chest feeling when you feel like you are running just to keep up with the world, but then Sunday, things started relaxing, much had been done, much less needed doing and the world felt slower. I felt I could breathe.

I knit a little on the bus to diner, but frankly, a bus lurching at 100km/hr, along a twisty hilly state highway is no place to knit sock yarn fish with knitpicks dpns, those things are way to sharp, and so the yarn becomes by default far to splity. So I knit one fish and put it all away, the trip home was in darkness - and while I can knit without looking, knitting in the dark in a moving bus with very pointy knitpics- well thats a whole different matter.


And the blanket, this photo was a few days ago, I've now completed the last large back to back L, and started the remaining small L. I'm planning to full this a little, not really felt, but full it to thicken it up a little. Then Caro can either use it as a blanket or a mat, it could do both. I laid it out on the wooden floor in the room at the back of our house, a sunny room, optimistically labeled the 'drawing room' on the original 1939 plans. Mmm, a 3 bedroom house in working class suburbia, New Zealand, brick with an iron roof, and with a drawing room? Pretentious or what? We use the room as a second lounge, and library, it houses some large bookcases, but in reality it is a dumping ground. The cubs bedrooms are either side of the 'drawing room' so until they grow a little and don't need to go to bed so early, the room is difficult for adults to use after 7:30pm. Little voices come calling in the darkness "is that you mum?". Plus things we don't yet want to deal with get left there, so I had a tidy up before the photo was made. The room looks much better, I should use it for photos more often, and it might stay tidy. The brass ruler next to the blanket is 36" long, so the blanket is nearly a yard long, a good size for a cot, or a play mat, or a snuggle rug.

Socks - well I said I wouldn't frog, but I'm thinking I might, that unsymmetrical decrease - well it bothering me, and I want to knit the second sock with a different decrease, s2 k1, pss's over, I think that one gives a line up the middle, but I can't if I don't frog sock one back now. I'll keep you posted. And a box of goodies arrived from California during the week, including some yarn specifically for a CB sock, complete with a pattern - so I'll show and tell in next weekend's post.

Stella

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Frog the sock - you'll be happier for it. I know I've just gone through something similar with a shawl.

Besides it will be so much quicker to knit to where you are the second time - you already know the pattern.

Angelika said...

I've seen those fishies before. It's a nice way to use up those little balls of sock yarn, but all the seaming. OMG. I have a room like your "drawing room" too. Everywhere we go. Right now it's my computer/craft/yarn/fabric room :) It's never been called a "guest room", even though it has a futon in it.