Sunday, June 17, 2007

Sick-bed Knitting

It's been a productive weekend for knitting, but not for the best reasons. K is sick and has been running a fever since Wednesday. The doctor says this flavor of virus lasts about 5 days, so I'm trying to be patient. I'm sticking around the house, and since I'm worried I knit.
Josephine had been languishing, but yesterday evening I finished the back:

After that, I finished the leg of K's Clown socks. Before bed, I had her try them on to test the length. What could cheer up a sick little girl like trying on some fancy new socks?

Alas, I discovered they were very tight going over the heel (this is a recurring problem for my socks...) I double checked my pattern. The stitch is a variation on feather and fan in which you decrease on either side of the fan on rows 1 and 3, then decrease again and add 6 YO's on row 5. It leaves a respectable portion of stockinette stitch for the self-patterning yarn without being boring to knit. But somehow I miscalculated the narrowest portion of the pattern by 2 stitches. Times 4 repeats. Oops.

So, I frogged the whole thing at 11pm, added a stitch between each pattern repeat, recalculated the pattern, and re-cast on. At 2am I had finished the leg, again. I am trying Charlene Schurch's "forethought" heel, which gives a cute little bull's eye on the heel and (more importantly) doesn't disrupt the repeats in the self-patterning yarn as you transition from leg to foot. I worked the heel while K watched Animal Planet this afternoon:






2 comments:

white oak studio said...

beautiful knitting!!

glad you stopped by my blog, as one engineer to another: isn't it amazing that we engineers also knit?! how cool is that?

my 12 year old son had a terrible fever virus this March - 103 degree fever for almost 6 days! scary but it did finally pass.

Jana

white oak studio said...

oh, and forgot to add - we've been to Glacier NP 3 times, just can't get enough of it. I think it's my fav NP.

Jana