A Break From Knitting

Dear Cynthia (aka the person who spent more than me again :-)

I'm anxious to get started on my new, fun, pink socks. I've been wanting to try the Mer-Made yarn for a while, and the hand-painted pink hank was calling my name, as was the Traveling Companion Socks pattern, which looked so great when we saw it made up in a hand-painted yarn while at the Blackberry Ridge open house.

However.....

.....first, I'm committed to finishing my Summer in Kansas Shawl. It looks like such a lump right now. I'm getting anxious to see what this will look like after blocking! I hope the whole "magic of blocking" thing regarding shawls is not an evil myth. No, it can't be. I've seen too many beautiful shawls transformed via blocking by other knitters as recorded in their blogs, so I'm confident mine will be no different, except for the part in which I'll notice a glaring and huge error smack in the middle of the thing once the stitches are opened up more and defined by the blocking...

I've completed 120 out of 160 rows. To bore you with the math, and using concepts of similar triangles, and because I will always be a geek and have stopped fighting it, the fraction of the area which has been knit is a multiple of the square of the ratio of rows. (This only is true for shawls in which the rows start out really short and then grow steadily.) In other words, when I had knit half of the rows, I was (1/2 x 1/2 = 1/4) done with the shawl. Now that I have knit 120/160, or three-quarters, of the rows, I am (3/4 x 3/4 = 9/16) done with the shawl, so just a little bit more than half done. I am making steady progress, continuing to work at least three rows per day. At this rate, the main body of the shawl will be done in two weeks. Sorry, but yes, I imagine you will be hearing about this project for another month as I also expound on the whole process of knitting my first ever border onto a shawl.

While my mom and I were at Nancy's Notions Sewing Expo this past weekend in Beaver Dam, we took a quilting class together. They taught a quilt-as-you-go method, which I have some mixed feelings about, but it was a fun project, and something else which has now achieved UFO status. When completed, there will be some wool felt leaves sewn into the large middle section, and a few more strips along the edges. It is a table runner... My goal is to finish it by fall, so that I may use it this year.

Well, time to get some lunch on the table.

Warm regards,
Laura (aka YarnThrower)