Thanksgiving Thoughts

Two years ago, on Thanksgiving weekend, the first year Kristen was away at school, I taught myself to knit. Today, she's even further away, all the way in Wales at the moment. She got herself there from Rome, and from there she'll go to Dublin and then back to Rome and then next weekend to Glasgow, and after that, she'll be home! She can travel the world without me, on her own, making careful plans and looking out for herself.

And I can knit better than I ever imagined two years ago. Today I finished a cardigan I've been working on for my mother. I soaked it and blocked it, stretching it out and stuffing it with many plastic bags, and maybe it will work out after all. It will probably be a week before it's dry and I can see if the size is big enough. But it's a pretty good looking cardigan.



And of course, once that was done--I had no knitting to do! Well, I have two lace scarfs, but they require good light and good eyes and concentration, and I wanted easy tv knitting. So I cast on a pair of socks.



Tomorrow I might go to Twist and try to buy yarn for a sweater for Kristen.

I am thankful for my life. For my husband, who is healthy, for my home, which is comfortable, for my job, which is just the right amount of challenging, for my body, which is still functional. I took a walk at the beach this morning, and I can walk, and it's in the 60s here, and it was sunny and the water was sapphire blue. I am thankful for this life.

Doubts

I don't have anything exciting to post, but I am tired of looking at the Boston Maki, so I will update my knitting adventures. So a few weeks ago I went to a fiber festival at Torrance rec. I picked up a bag of odds and ends of tapestry yarn that I thought would be useful for trying fair isle, since you often need small amounts of a lot of different colors for that. And I also bought a skein of Malabrigo Laceweight.

I had to take the laceweight back to the store it came from in order to wind it into a ball, and that shop is fabulous. It's called Twist, in Manhattan Beach, and one thing leads to another, so I ended up not only winding my skein into a ball but also buying 2 skeins of Frog Tree merino yarn.

So I got a bad case of startitis. I started a pair of mittens in color work with the odds and ends. (That will probably be frogged, but it's an interesting experiment.



And I started (and now finished) a scarf for Sam out of the Frog Tree (or is it Tree Frog?) That is the softest yarn in the world! I used it in a pattern that calls for cashmere, and I swear this is as soft and warm as cashmere. A lovely dark charcoal, all curled up in a scarf now.



And I cast on and got started on a lace scarf in the malabrigo. It's really fine and takes a lot of care to work with. You just can't zoom along with yarn as thin as spiderwebs! But it's very lovely.



And then there's the sweater for my mother--named Proud as a Peacock. Well I got the 2 arms done and I joined all the parts up and made some progress on the round yoke. But I have severe doubts about the whole thing. The fabric is really dense. And the sleeves are really narrow. And the whole thing seems way too small for an adult woman of any size. It looks, at the moment, like a really sturdy sweater for a 6 year old. What to do? I might as well press on and finish it, I think. Maybe when I give it a soak and block it, it will loosen up and grow?? It's more trouble to frog the whole thing now than to just keep going. I am probably within a week or 2 of finishing it.



And yesterday I bought sock yarn, like the one I used in my first pair of socks. Those socks have been so sturdy and wearable, and all the fancy-dancy sock yarn I have gotten since then has let me down. So if I finish the sweater, I will need something easy to knit, when I'm not knitting the two lace scarfs I have on the needles, and that would be socks!