Tuesday, June 06, 2006

Hanging by a Thread

Dear Cynthia,

Today, my tale is one of woe and disappointment. (Knitting, apparently, isn't **always** about the therapeutic value.) Last night, I ripped out the knitted-on-lower-edging of my Summer in Kansas Shawl for the third time... I had been happily approaching row 38 on my nice little edging pattern when I counted the stitches on my needle holding the main body of the shawl in all of its 405 stitch glory. (Why did I do this? Am I anal? Was I looking for trouble?) It was then I discovered that someplace in the midst of the 405 live stitches, I had misplaced one of them..... I considered moving on anyway, except given the other two prior froggings, I decided that I'd better go back and make sure I had not inadvertently dropped any live stitches.... And so, I took it back to the lifeline, a point at which I'm fully, or maybe just somewhat, confident that I was at a place in which everything was on track, and I felt really good about this project, and I was sleeping well at night.

In all of this, I had a chance to examine the shawl "off the needles" (being kept in tact only by that mere skinny thread of a lifeline), and I confess I felt a hint of disappointment by its small and crumpled appearance. (Shown here on our kitchen table, which is only three feet wide, I'm a little nervous that it will not offer the arm coverage I was hoping for on cool summer nights.) I'm keeping the faith right now that blocking will transform this mutant product of knitting into something looking more like this...but really, right now it truly is only faith - that which I believe without seeing...

If there is anybody who might offer reassurance regarding the whole shawl-blocking thing, I would love to hear that my doomful thinking is errant and that this will have a happy ending.

Warm regards,
Laura (YarnThrower)

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