This morning I wound up doing day job work for four hours, so once lunchtime came and went I was more than ready to get out of the apartment and do the sorts of things office drones are supposed to do on their weekends (and no, I don't mean check their e-mail). So I headed out to the Purple Purl, ordered a tea, and got down to some serious knitting.
As usual the place was packed with knitters making incredibly interesting things out of gorgeous yarn. One of the Purl's serendipities is that it seems like every time I drop by there, there's exactly one chair open for me to claim so I can knit stuff. It was great to get down to the business of getting my Knit That Shit projects further ahead, and it was even more great to see what everyone else was up to. It seems like every time I go there someone is making something using a method I've never seen before (and I've been knitting for over thirty years and like learning new things).
Sometimes when I try to knit in a group it winds up being not very productive because either I brought along something which requires a lot of concentration, or because I wind up neglecting my knitting in favour of conversation. This time everyone was interested in getting their projects down for fall, so although there was lots of conversation, no-one's needles stopped moving, and neither did mine. I got more done on the double knitted jacket than I have all week — I'm only about ten rows from finishing the section I'm on now (or about thirty rows before the much-anticipated armhole shaping, to put it another way). It will be good to finish the parts of the trees that I'm working on now, and even better to get to a part where I'm not just making a gigantic rectangle. I love this pattern, but because it's languished for so long I feel like I need to move on to its next phase to really feel like I'm getting somewhere.
On the way to and from the Purl I worked on the hearts & harps (Kristi) socks, so they got a bit closer to being done too.
Now: for the past two posts I've been promising that I would finish something this weekend. What I had planned to do was finish the Raccoon Jacket, since it only needs the ends darned in and the closures sewn on to be officially done:
I mean, it looks like it's practically there in the photo, right?
Tonight I turned it inside out (the only way to tell which is the right side is by the brightly-coloured bits of yarn I've tied to it — you can see one in the photo), and discovered there were more ends hiding on the inside. Many, many many more ends. I just did one sleeve and part of a front before I realised that there is no way I can get this thing done in a hurry.
A more realistic mini-goal is to get it done before the end of this month. We'll see.
As usual the place was packed with knitters making incredibly interesting things out of gorgeous yarn. One of the Purl's serendipities is that it seems like every time I drop by there, there's exactly one chair open for me to claim so I can knit stuff. It was great to get down to the business of getting my Knit That Shit projects further ahead, and it was even more great to see what everyone else was up to. It seems like every time I go there someone is making something using a method I've never seen before (and I've been knitting for over thirty years and like learning new things).
Sometimes when I try to knit in a group it winds up being not very productive because either I brought along something which requires a lot of concentration, or because I wind up neglecting my knitting in favour of conversation. This time everyone was interested in getting their projects down for fall, so although there was lots of conversation, no-one's needles stopped moving, and neither did mine. I got more done on the double knitted jacket than I have all week — I'm only about ten rows from finishing the section I'm on now (or about thirty rows before the much-anticipated armhole shaping, to put it another way). It will be good to finish the parts of the trees that I'm working on now, and even better to get to a part where I'm not just making a gigantic rectangle. I love this pattern, but because it's languished for so long I feel like I need to move on to its next phase to really feel like I'm getting somewhere.
On the way to and from the Purl I worked on the hearts & harps (Kristi) socks, so they got a bit closer to being done too.
Now: for the past two posts I've been promising that I would finish something this weekend. What I had planned to do was finish the Raccoon Jacket, since it only needs the ends darned in and the closures sewn on to be officially done:
Tonight I turned it inside out (the only way to tell which is the right side is by the brightly-coloured bits of yarn I've tied to it — you can see one in the photo), and discovered there were more ends hiding on the inside. Many, many many more ends. I just did one sleeve and part of a front before I realised that there is no way I can get this thing done in a hurry.
A more realistic mini-goal is to get it done before the end of this month. We'll see.