it’s only Tuesday …

… and it’s already been a long week.

I’m doing battle with my writing.  It’s not pretty.  But I ordered a new book on procrastination that I think might help.

Until I have more time to devote to knitting and blogging, here’s my latest hybrid shawl:

It’s plain old stockinette, with the usual triangular shawl cast on and increases, plus five (?) repeats of the medallion lace pattern followed by the edging from Evelyn A. Clark’s Knitting Lace Triangles.  (A very good book for mix-and-match fun.)

I used up every last bit of two skeins of Rowan kidsilk haze in dewberry (600), the free gift with my very first Rowan subscription.  Which makes it about three years old: one of the oldest yarns in my stash.

Having failed to read the instructions closely enough, I forgot to set up the edging and had to do an extra repeat of the medallion pattern to make the transition work.  And thus ran out of yarn.  I bound off with some leftover kidsilk in candy girl (606) to avoid all of that tinking.  Done out of necessity, it looks quite nice, I think.  It reminds me of my elementary school purple-and-pink phase.

Unfortunately, the weather is no longer shawl-friendly, so this one has not yet been out of the house.  Maybe next week?

so what have I been up to?

If I’m honest, sweet nothing.  But that’s not very nice.  Or strictly true: just nothing much of note.

I’m going through another existential writing crisis.  It’s gets boring after a while, really.  These have been going on at least since high school (freshman year, even) so I’ve got close to 15 years of experience under my belt already.  Which is a very depressing thought.

So I’ve accumulated notes, flagged texts, underlined passages, cryptic half-sentences, and lots of angst.  Deadlines (already long past, indeed part of the problem is the extreme inexcuseable lateness of all this and the attendant self-flaggelation) are looming again, simply because I’m moving on to NewU in August.  It’s last chance dance time around here.

But what about the knitting?

Well, that has also been problematic.

Yep, another hybrid shawl.  This project has been through many stages, indeed it’s been a veritable Kübler-Ross model in mohair.  I won’t take you though the sad, sad saga.  It involved much frogging, repeated tinking, a good amount of boredom, and not as much alcohol as might be assumed (or desired, looking at it from another persepective).

Now, of an evening, I select a Doctor Who episode, sigh, and get started.  My life has been greatly enriched by the presence of Tom Baker.

hybridity

Why hybrid, you might ask.

Enamoured as I was of the Ishbel pattern, I wanted a bit of variety in my life.  (Very little, but still.  I hear every bit counts.)  So with my thinking cap in the vicinity, I started knitting away on the stockinette portion, changing things up by increasing only four stitches every two rows (i.e. no increases along the upper edges on the purl row).  This continued until I’d increased to 195 stitches.  Originally, I’d wanted to then knit the lily of the valley border and peaked edging charts from the Swallowtail shawl.  (And thus followed the directions for casting on the Swallowtail shawl, beginning with seven stitches and a border of two garter stitches along the top edge.)  When the time came, though, I was unsure how the nupps would fare with the fuzzy mohair, not to mention the inevitable horror of undoing a misplaced mohair nupp.

So I changed plans.  Somewhere in the back of my mind rattled the possibilty of “195” and the Flower Basket shawl being somehow compatible.  I checked the pattern and — huzzah! — discovered I was right: 195 is indeed the number of stitches produced by six pattern repeats.  In the spirit of Ishbel, I knit five repeats of the flower basket pattern onto the stockinette body.

This was my fist time working with kidsilk haze — it is lovely stuff.  The silk gives the mohair such a nice bit of shine, which somehow made this color seem even more vibrant.  If only it weren’t so expensive …

Here are the details:

pattern: Ishbel + Flower Basket shawls

yarn: Rowan kidsilk haze (color 606: candy girl), 2.25 balls

needles: US7/4.5mm circs

started: March 25, 2009

finished: April 8, 2009

c’mon*

Seriously.  This was a case of spontaneous necklace self-destruction.  Unless the cat sat on it.

I obviously cursed the necklace by praising its numerous charms: relatively cheap, relatively easy, relatively quick.  Now it is absolutely broken.  In a way that I don’t think can be fixed, as I don’t want to involve super glue in a birthday present.

Besides, if it manages this just sitting on a table, how will it survive being mailed to Switzerland?

&*(#%#!

* That is, of course, in the voice of a decidedly miffed Gob Bluth.