Sick and tired and knitting nonetheless

I can count on two needles the number of days I haven't knit a stitch in the two-something years I've been a knitter. For me, it's a rough-and-tumble contact sport that tackles me, outwits me and leaves me crying softly in a heap on the floor for my dearly beloved to walk pityingly past at the ungodly morning hour when he is waking up and taking off and I haven't yet dragged myself and the remains of my dignity to bed.

I knit for better or for worse, in sickness and in health; and if heaven is as it should be, I will knit into eternity, the endless magic loop. Natch, an argument could be made, given my frequent, outrageous and generally unforgivable knitting sins, that I'll end up heading south instead of north; but it wouldn't be much of a stretch to imagine that any personalized hell would likely doom me to knit forever with a bitch of a yarn that I despise, like chenille, or pair me with an infernally tangled yarn that I love, like handpainted suri alpaca or Malabrigo or Noro Kureyon, or leave me stranded in the afterlife with a pattern written in cyrillic or some language I can't decipher. Knit one, curse two.

And so, even though I am sick and tired, and my daughter has pneumonia and my chest is wheezy, and it is late and I worked all week till the wee
hours, still I must pick up the mosaic baby hat for Bret's newborn, that I know already will fit a doll better than the baby, and I must make some stitch-by-stitch progress. Because that is how I measure my days, that is my value added, my herculean Susan Boyle effort.

improvisations in malabrigo

So I owe my middle kid a shawl/afghan/big project because I have been promising for a long time and it is way past her turn (if you ask her). And I have attempted a few times but something has always gone wrong -- last time, I tried a ruana like my old knitting bud Elise made her mom (from Cheryl Oberle's "Folk Shawls") with about 40 different yarns but I wandered away from the original color concept and went from elegant and subdued to "interesting" to outrageous to, really, unwearable, even by my standards, which are fairly, um, loose.

Now I have decided to make a rebozo, also from the Folk Shawls book. But of course I wasn't even mildly following the pattern. I instead was melding the idea (big wide rectangle with big wide stripes) with a Stephanie Pearl-McPhee stitch pattern for a scarf -- kinda garter ribs with a twist (K2, Kbl, P). And knitting as always mostly asleep at 4 a.m., I fell victim to bad math/early onset dementia. And so I ended up figuring that 5 times a 5-inch scarf would be wide enough; and I duly cast on the requisite 130 stitches and knitted away for about 10 inches before realizing the shawl seemed a little ... narrow. So I check back with the book (oh right, I forgot I was doing a real pattern!) and the width is closer to, ahem, 90 inches, not 25. You see, my stripes mistakenly go up and down instead of sideways; and that would really look like an overgrown scarf (like I made my mother-in-law) instead of the drapey flow of the traditional horizontal rebozo.

Seriously, though, isn't 90 inches obscenely wide for a shawl?

Fortunately, my knitting is nearly as imprecise as my math (I do live in a skewed parallel universe where up is sideways); and the 25-inch width is closer to 36. So here's how I plan to fix this particular travesty: I will make a 72-inch wide rebozo (give or take 10 or 20 inches), by casting on another 130 stitches and replicating what I've done so far. Then I'll seam the two and knit on happily at 260 stitches.

Problem solved!

Except for being about 900 yards short of Malabrigo. But within 5 minutes I was able to find what I think is the right batch (worsted Azalea 127 in this gorgeous purple/red/blue variegated) online in Tulsa (god, I love the Internet) so I ordered another 600 yards and I'll make do.

Off to the gym!