This has been a week filled with the fiddly stuff, and I admit that motivation has not been high. Of course, as often happens, I spent so much time fretting about the annoyance I felt at things I did not look forward to doing that by the time I actually started the effort seemed absurdly simple.
A lesson I may never learn.
First there was the unknitting of miscellaneous blanket squares that I had decided not to use. Hoping to avoid the tedium of ripping a rather friable and snaggy yarn, I seriously considered seeking some way to seam them into a scarf and be done with it. Alas, darning and repair was also needed, and that required the original yarn. Unknitting it was. There is obviously enough yarn remaining that something can be concocted, perhaps a scarf after all.
Once again, darning and mending proved to be simpler and less cumbersome of a task I had anticipated. Yet another example of the dangers of letting those inner gremlins rule.
My reward for finishing up the fiddly bits was winding yarn. I do love winding yarn. I had three skeins of Plymouth Baby Alpaca Grande in a dark gray that will be used to join the squares and create a knitted on i-cord border. The special bonus was that this was my first opportunity to use my new tabletop yarn swift. I retired my 30-some-year-old umbrella swift in December. The wood on the tightening screw threads which held the swift open were worn and no longer held and the mounting clamp did not seem to fit on any surface in the new sewing room.
I can attach my trusty old skein winder to the ironing table. I suppose this may be a bit of a pain as it must occasionally be removed for pressing. As I write this however, I am wondering if it would work better if I move it to the opposite corner, behind the iron rest, where it would be out of the way of the iron and still leave most of the pressing space free.
Here is a photo of the first two squares after being joined using a three-needle bind off. Because I want the join to be decorative I am picking up stitches, then doing the bind off with the wrong-sides together (rather than right-sides together) so that I get a lovely decorative ridge join between the pieces. The first two pieces were a bit of an experiment, because I wasn’t all that confident that the idea would work as nicely in real life as it did in my imagination. But it turned out well. And, it is fun and fast to knit.