My Knit Picks blocking wires arrived today.

I promptly dunked my Hanami stole into a vat of water, drained it and began threading the wires in.

It wasn’t as easy as I had imagined, but still way WAY easier than trying to stretch out this stole with pins alone. Hooray for whoever thought of blocking wires the first time!

Anyhoo, it took me some time, two glasses of wine, and a crick in my back, but the stole is finally blocking. (Don’t look too closely if you’re a perfectionist).

Strangely enough, although I used the same yarn and needles as the designer, I seem to have ended up with a stole that is about a foot shorter than it’s supposed to be. Maybe I was too cautious in the blocking, but when the yarn is extremely taut and making an ominous creaking noise, I have to stop tugging. Call me cowardly, but there you have it. (Maybe if I didn’t have people who needed things like ‘dinner’ and ‘bedtime stories’ kicking around, I could have stretched it out when it was still sopping wet and not re-sprayed-wet and it’d have gone further. Or maybe not. I have not found the Knit Picks Alpaca Cloud to be very stretchy in the past).

So here we have it, blocking on some mats I originally bought for gymnastic toddlers:

Actually, I have more done, up to the first increase after the waist.

As with all cable projects (and lace), the first couple of times through the pattern repeats have me cursing and unpicking and wondering what the h*ll the designer was thinking. Then, once I see it unspooling beneath my needles, I get all comfortable and jolly and mentally pat the designer on the back.

It’s coming along much more smoothly now that I have added a couple of row counters and an index card and pencil to my arsenal. ‘I’m _just_ knitting’, eh? Ha!

I need to keep the momentum up though. The temptation is strong to congratulate myself on how well I’m doing and slow down.

I must keep reminding myself how painfully short (and fast approaching) is Spring in these here parts.

I made a decision. I decided on yarn. I ordered yarn. I ordered extra cables for my interchangeable circular needles (because I don’t have long cables). I felt proud of my decisiveness.

Yesterday the first part of my supplies arrived (the cables).

I looked at them.

My eyes did that little darty, left-to-right-and-back-again thing as I thought really hard.

I had no clue what pattern I had decided to work on.

Even looking up my yarn order was no help. Sure I remembered picking out the Lamb’s Pride Bulky and deciding between “Orange You Glad” (which I loved for the name) and “Medieval Red” (which I ultimately chose, since I was more likely to actually wear it), but none of that helped me remember what in the heck I had decided to make with it.

This has never happened to me before. Normally I spend so long agonising over my choices that there is no danger of me ever forgetting any detail of the torturous process. This time I had been so bloody decisive that I’d instantly put the decision behind me and out of my life. And with two small boys and a husband rampaging around the house it seemed there was no way I was going to find that small, quiet space I needed to crawl inside my head and root around a bit. It was quite a worry, especially since, for once, I had not skimped on the yarn and had bought a fairly pricey brand that people seem to really like (thank you Webs for making it more affordable than I expected, though. Love you guys and your automatic discounts!)

Happily I found my little piece of peace, and got to excavate inside my memory for a while and things began to gradually come back to me. I was pretty sure it was in a paper magazine, not online. I was pretty sure it was in Interweave Knits. I was fairly sure there was cabling….EUREKA.

‘Twas the  Estes Cabled Vest I had planned on making. Hoorah!

I’m hoping it is a quick knit because the breathe of spring is teasing us here and I’d love to have it before it gets too hot to contemplating even holding wool for three months, never mind wear it.

Now I just have to clear the decks of any guilt-inducing Unfinished Objects and wait for the yarn to arrive. Woo-hoo!

I made this cardigan from the Rebecca magazine, and ‘finished’ it over a year ago. But I didn’t add the ruffle and I was never happy with how wide it was at the neck. Also, I always meant to go back and add a lace edging to the sleeves but never got around to it. As a result I had a 3/4 length-sleeved cardigan that looked like it didn’t quite fit me around the bust either. It looked like I was wearing my skinny niece’s cardi.

So I went back last week and started adding a band to the front edge. I cast on 11 stitches and joined the end one to the existing edge. (I’m sure there’s a term for that. You do it with applied i-cords and lace edgings and stuff).

I knitted it from the bottom hem, up one front, across the back and down the other side, and now my cardi looks like it fits me. Woo-hoo!

I used the Eyelet Lattice Insertion The Harmony Guides: Lace & Eyelets: 250 Stitches to Knit (p.191) from Interweave Press.

Now I’m happy. I may or may not add a lace edging to the sleeves. For now I’m goign to wear the cardi and feel smug.

Knot Knitting, so you know, Knot Here.

I asked what colours, and she said she liked my Jaywalker socks on Ravelry. (She’s stalking me).

They, of course, are made from a pre-dyed, self-striping yarn. But I had an inspiration.

I could buy all the colours in the yarn, look at the pattern, and recreate it in worsted.

So I did.

I’m really with pleased how it’s coming along.

This is just a quick picture post to confirm that the Hanami Stole did survive past the first few torturous rows and that I’m quite enjoying it now.

There are mistakes, sure, but nothing crippling. Yet.

Must be time for a lifeline…

I’m here to write about my experience today, so we’ll skip over the beaded cast-on (which went well), and the knitting-of-the-first-row and the unpicking-of-the-first-row-when-working-with-tiny-fuzzy-yarn and the part where I reached that point after getting to the end of the first row for the third time where I just went ‘sod it, I’ll do a couple of yarn overs. No-one will ever notice” and which I’ll probably live to regret.

No, today we get to the part where I”m sitting here and my yarn is tangling (because I couldn’t find my ball winder and had had far to much wine by that point to effectively search for it, and wound it by hand instead) and I’m working back and forth on slippery circular needles, and losing my place on the chart (I have a complicated relationship with charts. I love them dearly, but quite often they betray me) and…

I realised that my breathing was shallow, my shoulders hunched and my face fixed in a grimace.

Now, normally I very much knit to relax. This is not relaxing. But I’m hoping that as I get to grips with the chart and the repeats, as I get comfortable with the yarn and as the chart starts to take on less importance, that I’ll be able to relax into this and enjoy it.

Of course it’s entirely possible that it’s not the stole’s fault. The tension could have something to with the fact that I’m trying to knit this pretty complicated lace project at the dining table while supervising two small boys (one 5, one 3) who have been let loose with ink stamps, paints and water and who insist on saying “Mum, look at MY picture” “No, look at MY picture!” “I need more blue”, “NO! The BLUE is MY-INE!!!!” every four seconds.

Hmmm.

And I think I’ve found it.

I’m sitting here trying to resist winding into balls the two skeins of Knitpicks Alpaca Cloud I have burning a hole in my psyche, and casting on. It’s not like I have any uninterrupted-knitting-time for doing knitting-that-requires-paying-attention-to-the-knitting-and-the-chart.

I just want to have that kind of time and somehow casting on something complicated seems like an optimistic statement about life. Or “unrealistic wishful thinking”, as some might call it.

But I firmly believe that it’s optimism (however misplaced) that keeps us sane!

But the other weapon in my arsenal, against the monsters lurking in the dark pools of my psyche waiting for an opportune moment to leap out and drag me under, is my knitting.

Stephanie has a theory that knitters are not patient people, but that while knitting, we exist in a bubble of artificially-induced calm. I am using my bubble as needed.

After I lost my first baby, unexpectedly, at 12 weeks two days before Christmas, I cast on a lovely, complicated, decadent, and beaded lacy cowl. I worked on it and made it as beautiful as I could. It was a challenge and it was delicate and beautiful and comforting. And I finished it, which felt like quite an achievement, in the circumstances.

On Monday as I sat in the waiting room, wondering if we were going to see a heartbeat or not, I couldn’t take out my current project in case the news was bad and the project was soured by association.

But after I heard the bad news and was dispatched to another waiting room, I pulled out my sock and looked at it. The yarn, TOFUtsies, is supposed to have antibacterial properties.

“Oh well,” I thought. “You can be my healing socks.”

(Then I immediately thought, gack, you can be disgustingly perky sometimes!)

But don’t worry, the wallowing in self-pity comes later with me. When it tempts me (when I get a chance, with two small children running around) I pick up my healing sock and it makes me happy. I love the colours, the delicacy, the way the yarn-overs spiral one way and the colours of the sock spiral the other. I love the feel of the yarn, and I love the stitch-after-stitch repetitiveness and the knowledge that if I get it wrong, I can rip back and fix it.

I love that it keeps me focussed on the moment, on the present. And none of those moments are awful. I read about an author who lost her (eight year old?) daughter and turned to knitting to help her get through. How could she live through that, I wondered. That must be so much worse than my troubles. She must have had days when she needed the knitting to make her want to move at all. I’m guessing got through it stitch by stitch.

And that’s what I shall do.