MarQ1

Off to PTown.

F&F is coming along this time.

I cannot tell you how much I need this long weekend, or how much my co-workers think I need one too.

Back Tuesday.

This morning I pulled my purple pinstripe DKNY dress shirt out of the wardrobe clean and needing ironing. At the ironing board I found both cuffs buttoned and the little sleeve buttons buttoned too.

Why did I take the shirt off without unbuttoning the sleeves?

Yes, I have small hands.

The bed was finally empty, so I stripped off the burgundy sheets, laid down a clean white sheet for contrast, got Birch, the pins and some heavy-duty, color-fast thread and got to work. This is the largest thing I’ve blocked—or made—so far. At first I just used the thread to mark the shape and size I wanted and used pins to bring the shawl out to the line. This gave be a scalloped edge which didn’t look right. Using a darning needle I threaded a thread through every other loop of one of the two short edges. I tied one end of the thread to a pin, stretched the thread taut and tied it off to another pin. Then I pinned the thread to the required shape. I repeated this with the other short side. The long cast-on edge was tight enough.

I can’t be sure, but I think that the pattern’s use of a k2tog-tbl instead of ssk meant the two edges have a slightly different tension, ssk being a better mirror of the k2tog. It could just be my knitting. One edge was definitely easier to thread.

This is Birch, released from its pins. We have no appropriate models in this household and no good place to drape it artistically, so you’re stuck with some pillows under a bedsheet.

I had put F&F aside to finish Birch and rest my still sore right arm—too much keyboard and mouse activity at work—but have picked it up again. At the end of round 121, I have knit 35% of the stitches.

J & I are off to PTown Thursday for a six-day weekend, so I’m off to work today, so I can leave in good conscience.

What’s missing? Could it be the meters and meters (metres and metres) of Rowan kidsilk haze that’s been flapping from the ends of these 14″ Brittany birch needles since the beginning of July, i.e., Birch?

In my defense, I usually only worked on it during conference calls and staff meetings.

Pictures after the ends are woven in and the dear thing is blocked.

I still don’t see the point of all of those k2tog-tbl’s. Ssk would have better balanced the k2tog’s. Half of the decreases are twisted, half are not. Hey, but I followed the pattern.

This for Sean.

Geez, look at all those freckles. Where’d they come from?

At home today. A mental health day.

Today is again Primary Day in NY. Five years ago on Primary Day, I voted early and went into the office in Brooklyn early for an 8 o’clock meeting. The meeting ended early when someone on the other side of the table noticed that the north tower of the World Trade Center was on fire.

We watch both towers fall from a safe distance in an office tower in Brooklyn.

I have less a sense of dread than I had last year, partly because I did go to work in lower Manhattan yesterday, though I felt like I should have called in sick for the first four or five hours.

It’s like that moment you realize that your legs are no longer fast enough to run away from danger. Age has caught up.

At work I found myself thinking that I should walk around the west side of the floor to get to the men’s room rather than the east: it’s less exposed to the street.

So it’s Ironing Day, among other things. Nothing complicated. Sprayed graphite in the front doorlock. Knit.

The Tuesday after the week after Labor Day used to be the first normal working day after summer. Everyone was back from vacation. We could focus again on business. It was cool enough to switch to the heavier, fancier shirts. It was a new start. No more.

Less personal

Regarding Primary Day: when Rudy Giuliani runs for president, please remember that after 9/11 he was willing to subvert the democratic process and postpone the primaries and the general election so that he could be mayor longer. The primaries were held two weeks later and Giuliani did leave on time, though four to eight years later than I would have liked.

And I did go vote.

It’s been a frustrating week for knitting. I have a mild tendonitis inside my right elbow—too much copy and paste at work—so knitting has been limited. I did a bit of work on the gravevine scarf, but ran into a few problems.

Some people might look at the two halves of the scarf here and think that not having the color patterns match would be a problem, but that’s not the problem. It would have been nice if they matched better, but that isn’t insurmountable. A scarf, after all is usually wrapped around the neck, not hung for full-length display.

No, the real problem is with the stitch pattern itself. The main body of Barbara Walker’s pattern* is fine, but the edges as written do not match.

The pattern consists of a twelve-row repeat with the second six rows mirroring the first. And it does, except for the edges and, strangely, the stitich count. Rows 6 and 7 have one more stitch than rows 12 and 1. The left edge has couple of yarnovers, the right does not. The left lies flatter than the right, which has a scalloped, almost cabled effect and a definite tendency to curl toward the back. It seems to me that the lack of symmetry could be a problem in a knitted garment.

Why did I knit more than half a scarf with what I think is a flawed pattern? First, it didn’t occur to me until well into the first half. Second, the difference was much more pronounced in the more rapid color changes of the second ball.

I altered the pattern to mirror the left edge on the right and changed my selvage to get the fabric to lie flatter. I frogged the second half of the scarf and re-knit it, which you can see in the left-hand piece in the top photo. I’m frogging the first half too. I’ll knit about 15” in the current ball and switch to the other to knit to the middle, then re-knit the other half the same way. That way the ends will have the more varied colors.

I intentionally did not knit alternating the two balls. I wanted the pooling. I just hoped it would be closer.

I also reworked the pattern to mirror the right scallop on the left and ended up with one less stitch per round. Ms. Walker’s original, though it calls for a multiple of eight stitches plus six, has an eight-stitch repeat with fourteen edge stitches. The variation I used has an eight-stitch repeat with six edge stitches. My second variant has an eight-stitch repeat with thirteen edge stitches.

* Gravevine Pattern, A Treasury of Knitting Patterns, p. 220. The edges are clearly different in the illustration. The Trellis Grapevine on the following page has the same edge issue.