Apoptosis

As a child you have imaginary friends. As an adult--well, perhaps you shouldn't. Or, more likely, you have imaginary friends that are real people. Not the people as they are, but the people as your mind makes them, interacts with them. Sometimes this can happen in knitting too.

If the project is off, you can keep knitting and blame reality at the end. Or you can accept the truth and try to use the actual parameters available as a basis for reconsideration:

When you're a child you escape by going to imaginary places in the mind. As an adult, you've been places, you just revisit them mentally. As a knitter you rip and reknit. With some blocking-in-the-wild to check your hypothesis.

Equanimity

It's been quiet on the blog front lately.

On the knitting front I cast on an "epic" shawl in cobweb weight merino. Merino that fought me every inch, snarling back on itself, strands grasping the center of the ball desperately. Still I knit on, really enjoying the focus required. Enjoying the fabric rippling off my needles. Still a little voice would nudge me occasionally, trying to tell me something was wrong. Except nothing was wrong, the stitch count...perfect, the patterning...perfect, the colours...delicious. All other knitting lies abandoned.

About 600 yards in, I awoke one night realizing what was wrong. Gauge, desperately wrong. I jumped out of bed and blocked it in the wild - that wedge shown from about 9 to 11- blocked. Unpinning and measuring in the morning confirmed it. Should be a 23" radius, measures a scanty 11". But I like the fabric, yet didn't want the epic part to be neverending knitting. So I cast on in a larger gauge from one of the other balls. And loved the fabric. So the ripping began. Which the merino disliked even more than being removed from ball form.

Delicate cobweb weight threads, tangled.
Only beautiful when smoothed and entwined.
I want our threads to unsnarl, to relax.
To be transformed into something that,
if not beautiful, is useful and functional.

We're not enemies, yet so often we are tangled in misunderstandings.
The small scales of our surfaces caught on each other, creating a situation that will hurt or break one of us if not handled carefully.

Why don't people and relationships come with
clear pattern instructions?