theknittyvritti

i know, i know

It's been too long. Really too long.

Not without reasons...most of which have little to do with my knitting, and everything to do with those parts of life which don't fit so well with the blog.

I was amused and  caught up a bit short once when a reader commented.."love the blog, love the dog, love the lifestyle". I knew then that I had succeeded at leaving out just about everything in my life that was more challenging. In genereal, I made a decision early on to keep my daily challenges to myself. It's the shrink in me, I guess, who tries to only talk about personal things that are not too taxing for the listener. Except for challenging knitting, that is.

I am going to leave out some  challenging knitting with nothing to show for it; the three failed projects that have been my month of March. You missed nothing, I assure you. I, on the other hand, had to be there for every wasted stitch.

So....challenging knitting with a payoff!

 

The mediterranean lace shawl is finished.

 
It is unutterably beautiful.

 

I can't quite believe I made it. One cone and a smidge of another of exquisite cashmere/merino/silk cobweb yarn from Colourmart.

 

Every single stitch worth it.  I cannot describe what it feels like to wear it...a real cloak of invincibility in the face of life's challenges.

smaller than small

 

In case you've been  wondering where I am, this is it. Knitting the border of Yetta, otherwise known as the Mediterranean Lace Shawl. I've given myself a deadline for this one, but each of the fifty rows of the border takes an hour and a half.

That's a total of seventy-five hours of knitting, just to get this ready to hand off the Hightest, who has agreed (well, almost) to do the crochet border around it. I can't even guess how much time that will take, but I've promised to knit her a small sweater in return, and I think that I may be getting the better deal.

Sorry that I don't have anything more interesting to report, but an hour and a half a day of knitting a border with size 00 needles is really not interesting. Even to me.

Although I did get a laugh when someone asked me if I would sell this when it is finished.....laughable, really, since I'm making far less than ten cents an hour on the deal.

 
There she is, reclining on my couch, no plastic slip covers and...a dog sleeps here. She is appalled.

kvelling

 
 Once I've worked on a project for a while, it starts to assume an identity. I don't know what that identity is going to be before it takes shape, and there was really no way to see this coming....to my surprise, my Mediterranean Lace Shawl has turned out to be a Jewish grandmother, named Yetta. If you remember, she began complaining about her lot a few weeks ago, but she got a real surprise last weekend...wait, I think she's taking over......

So, nu, you know my granddaughter...DR. Knittyvritti...you, know, the doctor. Well, this week, she took me to Miami Beach! What a wonderful girl.

 
So, OK, we, make that I, never left the balcony, but still, the sun was warm, and she knit six rows, six rows....you know, that's about nine hours of work. I know I'm not easy....

 
Then, as if that wasn't enough, when she got me home, she put me in this clear plastic pouch, and left me on the couch. I'm so proud of her. it's a recycled package from a sheet. I taught her right. Save everything, you never know when it will come in handy.

It's like living in a plastic slipcover. So practical, I do love those slipcovers, and I can't get her to consider them for the furniture...even with all those dirty animals.....ah, well, her mother wouldn't go for them either.....

Did I mention my granddaughter is a doctor? And a wonderful girl?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

must....walk....away

 
I felt something. Looked down. The needle was bent. I hopefully straightened it and heard a sickening snap. Looked down again. Needle broken, stitiches falling off, and worst of all, yarn frayed from the sharp edge of the needle. Must....walk....away.

OK, who cares that most of my weekend knitting was getting the border of the shawl set up? Or that I'm going back to regular life tomorrow, when I will have little time to deal with casting on the 1552 stitches of the border to this shawl again? Or that I do not have another triple zero needle?  Not that I'm wanting to risk an accident like this again using such a delicate instrument?

Not me, no, I don't care.

I have to go now.

slow knitting

 

Blogging doesn't lend itself to the projects I'm currently working on. There's no way to churn them out and throw them up on the internet. They are each large, complicated items knit on small, small needles. Working on them is making me think about all the things in life that just take time, that can't be rushed.  And how fast we all want everything to move, especially today.

Funny I should be thinking about this, since I'm also writing (for work) about a psychotherapy in which the beginning evidences of arriving at the end results, while they are here, took much longer than even I expected them to. It has been almost excruciatingly moving to witness as the combination of hope and willingness to take tiny steps has resulted in the beginnings of a certainty that the desired ends will be achieved. At times, watching this effort has almost brought me to tears. So much so that if the goal was never reached, the effort would stand as something beautiful and meaningful anyways.

I feel similarly about these projects. They are each in their own way so exquisite, the work is so pleasurable, that if they were never finished, I'm not sure I would mind. How long I wonder, would you be willing to stop by and visit them? Would I be able to convey the satisfaction I find in them? Are you willing to find out? Or do you need an end product, a finished object, to feel like something is happening?

lace is not life

 

I've been slowly knitting away at the Mediterranean Lace shawl (rav link) from "A Gathering of Lace" over the last few months. It's my first cobweb weight shawl, and it's a big one, so it will be on the needles for a while, what may eventually come to feel like a lifetime. This one's not easy.

I've been ambitious with my lace projects. I started with a project that was designed for experienced lace knitters, and I have an indelible memory of the process of figuring it out. We were on vacation in South Africa, a place I'm unlikely to ever return to given the difficult travel it requires. Operations Man became so sick that he was confined to his bed for two full days. We were in a peculiar French provincial style hotel in the wine region, with an automatic shift car that I couldn't drive, and there was not much to do on my own. So I spent those days knitting and reknitting the shawl until I had learned the pattern and could execute it perfectly. The shawl is pretty much flawless. And the knitters among you will understand that I had quite a good time in that over-decorated, dimly lit hotel room.

This shawl has a few really complicated rows, and I haven't been able to master them. Earlier this week, I did them quickly, aware that I was making some mistakes, and decided to just blunder on ahead. And yesterday I faced the music. They needed to be re-done, so I spent about four hours ripping cobweb lace and carefully re-knitting the first row of the difficult section again. No one will know but me that I didn't get it right the first time around.

Lace is not life. I made another big mistake this week, one that I've done everything I can to rectify, but when you act like a moron, there's no way to erase what you've done. Ugh, I hate that. I so overreacted to something that I acted like an overgrown hyperarticulate child, and while I've analyzed my reaction (shrink style) and apologized for my behavior, the fact is, that there's no way to undo the fact that my mistake happened and left evidence of it's occurence in the memories of others. I suppose this is the time to confess that my ultimate fantasy in life is to be a Grace Kelley type blonde....cool, calm, always gracious, never dramatic or the least bit aggressive. And that alas, I am prone to fits of unmetabolized excitement over rather small events.

This has something to do with why I love lace, maybe especially this lace, which as it happens, is the color that is sometimes called Grace Kelly blue. Complex like life, takes damn-near a lifetime to do, but unlike life, all mistakes are fixable, as long as you take the time to go back and re-do them. The illusions of perfection and immortality....a human's dream. Easy to see why. In life, we don't  undo our mistakes. We recover as best we can from them. We, or sometimes others, carry them around for as long as they have to or choose to, and we have no choice but to keep moving forward. Hopefully to some less bone-headed moves, but inevitably to new mistakes as well, for as long as we're around to make them.