Cool linen tank. Rumpled cotton pants. Tired Mardel.
The tank is really quite nice and I am very happy with it.
Pattern by Ram Wools
Euroflax sport weight linen
The evening is still young but I can hardly keep my eyes open. I have much to do but little energy. There isn’t even a movie in the house to sit and knit by… Something will turn up I am sure.
You know, I was going to write yesterday but there was just so much work to do, and I was determined to get it done so that I could take time off for FUN things. Well by the time I got caught up with actual work I was sick of my desk and sick of my computer and unwilling to spend any more time here, even for a blog post.
I have been working on the linen tank:
I finished the body of the front and was up to the armhole shaping yesterday morning, when this photo was taken. I am actually about half-way up to the neckline by now so the front is going much more easily than the back, mostly because the interesting landmarks are more evenly distributed on a front than on a back. I am getting excited about finishing even though I know there is still a fair amount of knitting to do.
I’ve been doing other things as well, of course. My interest in purging and cleaning has continued apace and I took another large load of things to my local donation center this week. It is always hard, finding that happy medium between having enough and having too much, and deciding what is of value and what is not. When I am in the right frame of mind it is usually best to take advantage, as opposed to those times that I am upset or otherwise stressed and am just discarding for the sake of venting frustrations.
I have also been reading again and it is a conflict in time of course. I can knit to a book on tape, but there remains nothing as nice as holding a good book in the hands, and turning the pages while savoring the prose. Last weekend I was savoring the prose of Michael Chabon, as I moved up the queue in the local library system a little faster than I had anticipated, and The Yiddish Policeman’s Union arrived in my hands on Friday. Now that was a GOOD book, and there is nothing quite like a good read to calm and refresh the spirit.
I suppose I am a dinosaur, with my interest in books and fibers, the pleasures of actually making things with my hands, and reading an actual book rather than staring dumbly at a screen and reading the text. But sometimes it seems there is too much pressure to do more and more and more. And with that brings more emphasis on instant gratification. Click and read. Buy online and ship FedEx and so forth and so on. Stay on top of all the news of the world. Sometimes I think it really does us no good to actually know everything that is going on as it is going on in the world, it just increases our stress and our sense of helplessness.
Increasingly I am convinced that the life well lived is not the life with the most things crammed into it.
But here it is, the Fourth of July, Independence Day. And I am happy to be a citizen of this country, and I am proud of those who we celebrate on this day. And because of the efforts of those earlier great visionaries, I can spend the day with books and yarn and fabric.
Well, I have not started the front of the linen tank yet, but tonight is knitting night and therefore I am certain that some knitting will take place.
I have however, learned something from the half of this sweater, and I am determined to avoid the endless tangles. The light beige yarn was rewound the first time around. But the blue, and the second skein of taupe are sill in their initial center-pull balls. Although I have started rewinding the blue, I don’t think I will finish both before tonight’s knitting group. Sitting and winding is almost as nice as sitting and knitting however, so I dont’ see a problem here.
The little taupe balls are the left-over bits of the first skein: pre- post, and mid- knot, surgically disentangled.
Just as I my arms were beginning to ache and my fingers were beginning to rebel…
Just as my frustration level was about to outgrow the bounds of my control….
Just as I thought that double moss stitch was the cruelest form of knitting torture…
Just as I thought I would abandon knitting altogether to avoid another row….
I realized that I was almost done with the back of the linen tank.
Whew!!
Once I knew that all that was left was the little bit of shoulder shaping my resolve strengthened and I knew I could finish.
Actually once I got back into my knitting groove it went quickly.
Now for the front. I am filled with anticipation and dread. The bottom will be easy, the alternating stripes, the thrill of changing yarn….but then comes the dreaded expanse of double moss stitch, endless back and forth, knitting stretching to the end of the horizon like a sea becalmed.
Well, perhaps it won’t be that bad.
At least I can dream of wearing a cool linen tank. I can dream of the next project, and I can even enjoy knitting the dreaded double moss stitch, and now that I have passed the "half-way hump" perhaps the front will go faster and I will finish before I even have a chance to realize how quickly it has gone.
The linen tank progresses and I have begun the armhole shaping.
But actually what seems to be the greatest progress on this project so far is the rewinding of the current skein of yarn from center-pull tangle to hand-wound ball.
Is this common for linen yarn? I can’t keep the yarn tangle free. The balls, at least the center pull balls that I wound, keep falling apart and the yarn is just stiff enough that it grabs ahold of itself and creates wondrous rat’s nests of yarn. Some evenings it seems like more time spent untangling than actually knitting.
Last night I broke down and rewound this skein into a ball.
I shall have to see what happens with the rest of the yarn. The blue and light taupe can be managed, they are only used for short bits. I have one of them in a "yarn bra" and although that keeps the outside strands of yarn from falling down and tangling, it does not seem to offer any relief to the masses of knotted yarn that pull out of the center of the skein.
Perhaps I should just rewind the second skein of taupe into a nice round ball before I begin the front of the sweater.
The linen tank is progressing slowly, in little bits and pieces here and there. I knit in such short snatches of time that I would deny that I had been knitting, but I can see that it simply isn’t so:
Ten inches of the back knitted, about 4 more inches before the armhole shaping. Tomorrow I drive down to LaGuardia to pick up DSD Miriam and baby Owen so there will not be much knitting perhaps, but I am anticipating some knitting and visiting over the weekend.
Well, the stitches came out of my finger and it is no longer sensitive to the touch of the knitting needle, so knitting has resumed, although not at the pace I would have hoped.
Somehow I had believed that retirement, even partial retirement, as I am still doing office bookkeeping and accounting, would afford me more time to knit and sew than has so far been the case. Of course there are other things going on, and even office tasks are behind schedule, in part because there is no firm schedule. I used to like to think that I was a fairly adaptable and flexible person, but I did have a schedule of sorts that I followed for maintenance around the house and for work. I also had time to knit and sew and read. But now it seems that keeping even the simplest schedule seems impossible and I find that I am not happy with this random slow – motion – do – what – ever – occurs – to – you – at – the – moment kind of existence.
So in this slow-as-molasses world where one still seems to be busy but nothing gets done, you would think I would be so grateful to escape into knitting time that I would embrace it with attention. No so. Apparently double moss stitch is not quite as mindless as I had thought.
Or perhaps nothing is truly mindless at 3 in the morning.
Upon looking at the above photo, there are several areas where I have messed up the order of the stitches, most apparently in the wide blue stripe. Although generally, since this is the back, I might not notice this unattractive tangle of misplaced stitches, but then again, someone else might. I am fairly certain that, now that I am aware of its existence, visible or not, I will feel like there is a big glaring light on my backside drawing everyone’s attention to that part of my anatomy which can least bear the scrutiny.
Once again, we are moving backward.
Cool linen in taupes and blues just speak of lazy summer days. A lazy spring weekend yielded a completed gauge swatch and the beginning of a summer sweater. The swatch was actually started at Thursday knitting but did not progress far as my hands were to busy shoveling salty snacks into my open mouth, and the slippery Addi turbos that I had with me did not make linen knitting particularly enjoyable.
Once I got home and switched needles however, this project became pure joy.
My next project was one that I wanted to be simple and mindless, although I am seriously considering another simultaneous projects for those times when I am capable of actually focusing my attentions rather than sitting dumbly and letting my fingers mindlessly do the work. This project was supposed to be simple stockinette. It is double moss stitch, still easy-peasy compared to the tedious rice stitch of the last project.
I am knitting a project that has been in my stash for a few years, it leapt out at me as I was searching for a potential yarn for some other dreamed-of sweater.
The pattern is by Ram Wools the yarn is Euroflax Linen in the colors pictured. Summer days await.