Hiberknition

I am not a native Hoosier but I grew up in the Midwest, so when I first arrived in Indiana, the almost constant gray of its winter was a bit of a surprise. I am not affected by SAD, but still. This weather is growing tiresome. If I could stay home and hibernate, it would not seem so bad, but I actually have to go out and drive to work while slush falls from the sky. Ick.

The missing stitch on the red-red-red (are you getting tired of that phrase yet?) sweater/hoodie magically reappeared, but now I have two extra stitches. There is nothing like the body of a 190-stitch-per-round sweater to make one lose one's attachment to perfectionism. No way am I ripping out 1900 stitches of stockinette (I think that is where the offending stitches multiplied - it's hard to tell because of the lace pattern crawling up the front). Jeeze - I never thought about just how many stitches a sweater takes. Hmmm... 190 stitches per round, 6 rounds per inch, tap-tap-tap on the calculator - that's 17,100 stitches just for the below-the-armpit section of the torso. Yikes! Some things are better left unknown.

The Blue Lagoon blanket is also loosening my grip on perfectionism, at least as far as slavishly following a pattern goes. I made some modifications to the Sweet Cherries pattern because I wanted to carry the yarn up the side but it was too difficult with odd numbers of rows for some colors. The Blue Lagoon does not suffer from this problem, but the pattern looks like water, so I'm going with a more random version of the pattern repeats. Just for fun. After all, it is all garter stitch, so I feel compelled to inject something different to stave off the boredom. And I am not carrying the yarn up the side; instead, I break off and knit the ends in as I go. This results in less yarn wrangling. The blues are very soothing, too, so this is an enjoyable diversion.

Unlike the Trekking socks. Yesterday at lunch, it took me nearly an hour to knit ten rounds on the sole. That's 780 stitches, 780 tiny stitches on 4 tiny needles. This is why we knitters work on multiple projects at one time. When one is driving us nuts, we can give it a time out and pick up its jealous sister for a while.