December 7, 1941: A Date Which Will Live In Infamy
Remember and Honor
~~~~~~~~~~
Yes. Ok. I admit it. I caved to my mom’s request for a hand-knit scarf for my dad. My dad has rarely asked me for anything, and has given me everything within his power/budget/ethics he could. Really, does this man deserve anything less? So, now it’s crunch-time. Because we’re actually celebrating on December, 23rd, I have a little over a week in which to knit it, block it, dry it and wrpa it. At least I’m done with the charting, which seems to be the hardest part. Well for me at least.
Unfortunately, my original yarn of choice left much to be desired. I wanted to hand-dye the yarn (to make it extra-special) and had some worsted weight in my stash reserved just for such an occassion.
Unfortunately, come to find out after the fact, there’s a lot of vegetable matter in it, which I’m sure you all can see. And I don’t mean the occasional a piece of barnyard flarn attached that’s easy to pick out. No. I’m talking as-if-it-were-spun-in-and-thoroughly-embedded-in-every-inch-of-it hay and grass and TWIGS, twigs for kreist sake! Yeah, not so comfortable on a tender 81 year old neck. Nope, this stuff is going back into the stash either awaiting that perfect rugged out-doorsy rug/doormat/saddle blanket knit (of which I have SO MUCH need /sarcasm), or when I get tired of it taking up so much room, find a magical way of removing it from my stash. Maybe I’ll use it for some Lilypads. Dunno. All I know is that it’s not going to be knit into nice cables to be wrapped around my dad’s neck.
I had almost resigned myself to hitting Stitches In Time on the way home tonight (yarn shopping, oh. darn) when I decided to do a little stash-diving. And lookie what I found!
That there is close to 500 yards of soft silky, wooly & cashmere-y heaven, in a similar shade of blue! Kismet! I plan on knitting this most of the weekend. The pattern is relatively engaging, well, as far as I can tell with my test-knit-on-shit-yarn trial. So it should be doubly enjoyable with yarn I actually like. We’ll see. I’m just thrilled that I’m able to kill 3 birds with 1 stone: a) Make something special for my dad for Christmas; b) Reduce my stash a little, thus making room for new stash enhancements; and c) Suss out a cable pattern I’ve been obsessed with since the first time I ever saw it, a couple months ago, on a borrowed DVD.
Leave a Reply