Ene’s Scarf: I’m half way!

I stuck out the Ene, didn’t frog it after all. I figured out where I made mistakes, decided they didn’t show and carried on.

I’m halfway done! Thank you to Madorville for showing us how to figure out what percentage of a triangle we have already knitted. Her excel spread sheet is very useful if you are wondering whether you have enough yarn. She uses the Ene as an example and reports that Row 55, the last knit row of the first time through Chart 3, is the half way point. The rows are gradually getting shorter, the pattern is easier. I can see the triangle taking shape from the double decreases running down the middle.

Now this is pleasurable knitting. There is an easy rhythm to the stitches, alternating three stitch repeats. It requires just enough attention to be interesting without being frustrating. I can relax and feel the steady flow of yarn through my fingers. This is the knitting I have in mind when I say I like to knit. In my mind’s eye I see myself one with a long line of women knitting through the centuries, sitting quietly in a sunny window, our needles moving smoothly as something beautiful takes form from the yarn in our hands. This is the way knitting should be.

I might be tempted to check Madorville's formula at the end of each knitting session, to be ever mindful of my progress, of how much longer I must knit before I will be done. But I won't! This time I refuse to rush in anticipation of reaching the end, anxious to begin the next project. I’m going to let go of my timetables and let the knitting set its own pace. I’ve worked hard to get to this point in my Ene journey. I’m going to savor it.

1970 Knitting In The Office

I didn’t think I had much in common with the other women. They sat all day at their metal desks, six lined up in the center of the room, three facing the walls, working at their adding machines and typewriters. I was in graduate school and after morning classes, worked afternoons in the university’s accounting department processing invoices. Each day I arrived during the lunch hour to find a big stack of invoices on my desk. My job was to take out the staples, put the invoice together with supporting papers in order with the invoice on top, staple the stack back together, add up the amount payable, stamp the invoice with a big rubber stamped form and fill in the blanks with the payee, invoice date, invoice number and amount to be paid. With slight variation, it was what we all did. Invoices were received in the mailroom; date stamped and assigned a number. Each of us was given part of the numerical sequence.

Promptly at 3:00 the yarn came out and for 15 minutes the women knit. I watched baby blankets, sweaters and one bikini take form. They knit every day during their morning and afternoon breaks. They knit at lunch too. They were cheerful and friendly and when one day I brought in yarn, they helped me. I began coming in earlier during the lunch hour to join them knitting before starting my work.

Most of them had returned to work after raising children and still went home at night to cook dinners and keep house for their husbands.

Thelma was the lead clerk. Her desk was a little separated from the others, off to one side, closer to the male supervisor who sat alone in a glassed in office in the corner of the large room. She went home at night to care for both her own elderly mother and her mother-in-law who both lived with her. She laughed about the burden of caring for the "mothers", the loads of laundry and special diets.

Marta crocheted blankets for the babies of nieces and nephews and told me about her big Mexican family and the successes of her husband and brothers. Jean knit a layette set for her daughter’s third child.

Merle, a divorcee who smoked at her desk, was the most flamboyant of the bunch. She was knitting the bikini and I enjoyed her rebellious humor. She was the first knitter I knew to hold the yarn in her left hand. Doing something just a little different from the norm appealed to me and I have been knitting continental since. One day Merle quit coming to work and one of the other women whispered she had been hospitalized with a nervous breakdown.

Jackie smoked too. She was different from the others, single, almost thirty. When the yarn came out, Jackie reached for the book she was reading and ignored the chit chat around her. She wore straight skirts and tailored shirts, unlike the soft skirts, blouses and cardigans worn by the older women. She had graduated from the university and processing invoices was not how she wanted to spend her life. She often called in sick or went home early with a headache. Many afternoons Thelma sorted through Jackie’s in-basket and gave much of its contents to me.

It was 1970, my consciousness was not yet raised. I didn’t question that the open teaching assistant position would automatically go to the male graduate student. I was glad to have found this part time job, but I knew Jackie was trapped.

I only spoke to our supervisor once. He was a pasty face young man who didn’t mix with the women. After I had been there a short while he called me into his glassed in office to tell me my work was adequate. Then he asked me if I liked the piped in music that played while we worked. He told me he arranged for it as studies showed music made employees more productive. I told him I preferred silence. I needed to tell him I didn't plan on staying.

Ene's Shawl - to frog or not to frog

I am knitting Ene’s Scarf as part of a Ravelry knit along. And I’d like to quit.

The scarf starts with a horrible 375 stitch cast on! Yuck. It took what seemed like forever but I carefully counted out the cast on stitches, placing a marker after every 25 stitches. When I was done I double checked, so going into the first row I knew I had the correct number of stitches. The first row is full of double decreases. Again, I counted carefully, placed markers after every pattern repeated and at the end of the row checked carefully that there were the same number of markers on each side of the center stitch. Everything worked out.

The scarf begins with a 22 row lower edge in a simple diamond pattern. The rows are so long, it took quite a lot of knitting before I could see the pattern taking shape. No instant gratification here. Eventually I had the 22 rows knitted without too much unknitting. I counted it out as I went and knew when I’d made a mistake in time to correct it within the row. But with a 375 stitch row, if I discovered a problem because the count didn’t work out when I arrived at the center stitch, and the problem was toward the beginning of the row, there was a lot of unknitting to get back to fix it.

When I got to the end of the diamond border I realized I was one stitch off on each side of the center stitch. It was perfectly symmetrical. I’d made the same mistake on both sides. I think I missed a decrease on either side of the center stitch about 8 rows back. It looked fine, wasn’t throwing the pattern off so I decided to fix it in the very straightforward 10 row chart that followed. This chart is 9 rows of garter stitch with a yarn over knit 2 together row in between. However, there were also some decreases at the beginning and end of the rows. As simple as the second chart was, I made more errors and had 2 extra stitches on one side and 1 extra on the other. I’ll blame it on the long rows again. By the time I’d get to the end of the row, I’d forgotten what I’d planned when I began the row. Fortunately, these are the rows in which errors can be compensated for without throwing the pattern off and I ended chart 2 with the right number of stitches on both sides of the center stitch.

You’d think I’d be eager to go on to chart 3 and finish this shawl. The rows are getting shorter. I’m down to 313 stitches from the original 375. Chart 3 continues for the bulk of the shawl, the rows getting shorter and shorter all the while. So, once I get the hang of the new pattern, finishing should be easier than what I’ve done so far. In fact some knitters have called it boring.

So, why am I not eager to keep going? I don’t like the fact that I compensated for mistakes instead of correcting them. And I’m not sure I like my yarn. Yes, I know a lace shawl always looks like a crumpled mess before it is blocked. And other knitters have used the same yarn and been happy. I know this yarn will make a warm cozy scarf when it’s done. But the real problem is, I really don’t like a bottom up triangle shawl. The long lower edge is just so unruly I’m not convinced about the finished product.

I’m not going to quit! The way I see it, my choices are to frog it all and start over in another yarn or stick it out and finish this one. It would probably go much easier the second time around and I do have some beautiful slightly variegated merino lace that would be perfect for this pattern. But I really don’t want to cast on those 375 stitches all over again. I guess I’ll take a break and then later today, lay what I’ve already done out flat, pin and try to see what the yarn will look like blocked, make sure my mistakes really aren’t visible, and decide what to do next.

She Taught Me to Knit and Fixed My Mistakes

I'm going to teach a friend to knit. To begin a piece of knitting, you have to cast on. That's where most knitting teachers start. But I might cast on for my friend. And I might knit the first row, too, because that's what Aunt Bobbie did for me when she taught me to knit almost fifty years ago.

Casting on is more difficult than straight knitting and the first row after the cast on can be too tight to knit easily. So, when I spent time with her one summer, Aunt Bobbie cast on and knit a few rows. Then she showed me how to hold the needles in my two hands, how to insert the right needle into the right-most stich on the left hand needle and pull a loop of yarn through.

My first attempts were full of split yarn and dropped stitches. Aunt Bobbie looked at my knitting and laughed.

"What did you do?"

Then she took it from me, unknit most of what I had done, fixed my mistakes, reknit the row and gave it back to me to start over on the next row.

Aunt Bobbie was very different from my mother. My mother was blond, blue eyed, serious and stern. Aunt Bobbie had dark hair and brown eyes, wore bright colors and seemed always to be happy and cheerful. My mother sun bathed. Aunt Bobbie covered up so she wouldn't get too dark. My mother was a good cook but Aunt Bobbie made tacos and enchiladas and served them with homemade bread, cake and pies. One summer she taught my mother and my grandmother to make earrings from watermelon seeds painted with bright red nail polish. My mother never wore nail polish.

My mother went to work when I was seven. Aunt Bobbie was a traditional housewife who should have had a house full of children. But she was just a bride when surgery made that impossible. My mother said the doctor was a butcher.

In the 1950's theirs was a mixed marriage. My aunt and uncle were not allowed to adopt. She doted on us instead.

When I was three she made me a doll that looked like me, was as big as I was, and had braids of yellow yarn. The rickrack red plaid dress with a ruffled white pinafore she made for me when I was seven was my favorite.

One Christmas she made a gingerbread house and decorated it with Necco wafers and gum drops. It was the first gingerbread house I had seen outside of a fairy tale.

The days I spent with her were fairy tale like, vacation days without chores. I was well behaved and so she rarely corrected me. By the time I was old enough to understand the pain in her life, she was gone. When I remember her, I remember her cheerful. I remember her trying to do for me whatever would make me happy. I remember her teaching me to knit and fixing my mistakes.

Swallowtail #2

Swallowtail Number 2 is done! And that is a good thing because I’ve signed up for two more shawl KALs on Ravelry. I’ll be knitting another Evelyn Clark design, the Heartland Lace shawl, and Nancy Bush’s, Ena’s Shawl, found in Scarf Style from Interweave Knits.

This one was done in some Morehouse Farms Merino Lace I had in my stash for several years. I'm not real happy with the yarn. The thickness varied a lot! In places it was as thin as thread. When I finished binding off and pulled the yarn through the last stitch, the yarn broke. I had to undo about 20 stitches of bind off, attach new yarn and bind off again. And then when I pulled the yarn through the last stitch, it broke again!

But it blocked out beautifully and the color is prettier in the shawl than it was in the ball.

Blocking Lace

What happened here?










Some knitters say they hate to block. I’ve even heard a few say they refuse to block, limiting themselves to patterns and yarns that don’t require blocking. Not me! I love to block because I love what it does for my knitting. I am not as good a knitter as I would like to be. My stitches are not perfectly even. My edges are not perfectly straight. This is particularly true of lace. The intricate stitches don’t lie flat and neat, the pattern is lost is a rumple of yarn that looks nothing like I intended. Blocking turns that unruly pile of yarn into beautiful knitted lace right before my eyes.

As soon as I bound off the last stitch of Swallowtail #2 I set out immediately to get it blocked. I am a fan of wet blocking. I want every bit of fiber thoroughly saturated with water to insure the blocking can work its magic. I soaked the shawl in lukewarm water in the bathroom sink with a little bit of shampoo and rinsed it with a little bit of conditioner. It is hair! After about half an hour, I drained the sink and squeezed out the excess water, first by pushing the shawl against the side of the sink and then rolling it in a big towel and squeezing the towel.

The magic comes when the shawl is laid out on the blocking boards. This time I had new soft linking mats purchased at Lowe’s. These are 24 inch square plastic mats that fit together like a jig saw puzzle, sold as a play surface in the flooring department. They come four to a package. I bought two packages and fit 5 squares together in a triangle shape on my cutting table. One side of the mats has a gridded surface. I put this side up and the grids seemed to grab and hold the damp shawl in place as I worked. Pins went easily into the pads and, because of the grip, fewer were necessary. In short order Swallowtail #2 was drying, pinned tightly on the pads.

And that’s when I saw this conspicuous hole, impossible to ignore against the playroom yellow of the blocking mat! It looks as if I tried to pick up a dropped yarnover several rows later and somehow ended up with the right number of stitches without getting all the stitches in their proper places.

But I know the shawl won’t be stretched out like this again until I have to wash it some day. And blocking had done for the shawl what I hoped it would, revealed the beauty of the pattern, evened out my stitches and gave the shawl a beautiful drape. The hole will disappear into gentle folds falling over my shoulders. I’ve decided not to see it!

Knitting In The Present Moment

There always comes a time when I want the project I’m working on done so I can go on to the next one. I start making timetables and setting deadlines for myself.

“I’ll finish this section before I go to bed. I’ll do the
rest tomorrow and block it the day after,” I tell myself.

That’s what I did yesterday with my second Swallowtail Shawl. I was making good progress, had completed 14 rows of the Budding Lace 2, all that the pattern called for, but I wanted an extra 5 pattern repeats and decided yesterday was the day I’d get them done.

I started out knitting along quickly but soon realized that the third row of the pattern repeat wasn’t working. I couldn’t figure out where I’d made a mistake. I took it out a little, fixed where I thought might be a problem. But whatever problem I fixed must have been created in the unknitting and was not what needed fixing. I took it out stitch by stitch back to the very beginning of the pattern repeat, the place where I began the day’s knitting. And then I did the same thing again. And again. I surrendered and left it to sit overnight exactly as it was when I began the day’s knitting. I’d made no progress whatsoever!

Rushing knitting is a little like rushing a two-year old child. Too often what you get is a tantrum. And it really makes no sense. It would be a lot faster to bop down to Macy’s and buy a shawl.

Knitting must be done stitch by stitch. It is a spiritual discipline really. Knitting teaches me to be fully present in the here and now, not distracted by the past or concerned for the future. When I submit to its lessons, knitting each stitch in its turn, focusing on the row I’m knitting now and not the ones I’ve decided I have to get done before I go to bed, something beautiful grows in my hands.