G. Knerd

The wedding blanket continues.  Just, er…not as quickly as I need it to.

See, when I do some quick calculations, it turns out that I have roughly 754 rows left to knit (not including the border, which I’m purposefully not thinking about in an attempt to hold on to my sanity).  And even if I assume that I’ll be able to knit every day until the wedding (which I won’t) and that I won’t have to spend any time blocking (which I will) and that the border will just magically appear out of the ether (which it won’t)…even if I assume all of that, I still have to knit at least 15 rows every day in order to get this done.  Which doesn’t sound that bad, except that each row is roughly 139 stitches, which means I have to knit 2,085 stitches every day from now until the wedding in September.

Pray for me.

This last weekend, for the first time in my life, I had the overwhelming urge to knit a flap heel.  On every other sock I’ve ever knitted, I’ve done an 
Auto Heel - it was the first heel I ever learned how to do, and it’s the only heel I’ve done since.

And yet, when I got to the point that I was ready to add a heel onto the go-everywhere socks I’m knitting, my first instict was: “I should use this pair of socks to try out a flap heel.”

I think it’s because I’m finding that I actually really don’t like these socks.  Mostly it’s the colors – and what’s driving me nuts, of all things, is the green.  Those who know me will blink a bit when they read that, because green is by far my favorite color, and yet when used in this sock, I hate it. I think it has too much brown mixed in or something.

Poor flap heel – given that I’m predisposed to not liking these socks already, the chances the experience of the heel will convert me away from the Auto Heel are small.

Then again, when you’ve already learned the best way for you to do something, why change?

I should really be working on the Wedding Blanket, but for the last couple days I’ve had a new obsession.
 

That, my friends, is a friendship bracelet maker that I found at Old Navy for a few bucks.  I figured that, since I tend to like fiber arts in general, I might enjoy this.  Plus, it would likely give me a way to add more decorative cords whenever I needed them.

It might be hard to tell from the picture, but the rope it’s making has these little mini flowers on it.  After only a few hours, I have almost four inches of super cute, delicate, flowered rope.

I think I’m in love.  And the Wedding Blanket?

Maybe I can finish it after the wedding?

The Knitting Black Hole is a well understood recognized phenomenon wherein a knitter knits and knits and never seems to make any progress.  Generally related to large swathes of stockinette, the Knitting Black Hole plagues many a knitter, often causing severe emotional distress and consternation.

More rare, however, is the Knitting Shrink Hole.  This phenomenon is categorized by a section of knitting that not only refuses to grow with more knitting, but goes so far as to shrink between measurements.  Often, this shrinking behavior is in strict opposition to any swatches that may have been performed on the pattern before casting on for the actual project.

The Wedding Blanket is a prime example of a Knitting Shrink Hole.  When I swatched the center pattern, I ended up with something that told me that if I did 9 repeats, I would end up with 6 feet exactly.  However, 9 repeats later, I’m not at 6 feet at all.  I’m not even close to six feet.  After 9 repeats (or 500+ rows, or several thousand stitches), where am I?

I’m at 5’2″.  That’s 10 whole freakin’ inches short!  That’s very nearly a foot short!  Where did those inches go?

It’s unclear.

And don’t even get me started on width.  When I started the center section, I was sure it was at least 18 inches.  I measured it constantly, and I was always very, very sure that it was a foot and a half wide.  Dead certain.  I would have staked money on it.

Now that I’ve knit the entire panel?  Not so much.  Now it looks like it’s clocking in at 12 inches maybe, and that’s if I stretch it out a bit.

I’ve never experienced a Knitting Shrink Hole so extreme.  Sure, an inch or two here or there, but 50% shrinkage?  Without getting wet or felted?  What’s going on?

Luckily, I can still console myself with the fact that I haven’t yet blocked it.  Blocking will fix everything, right?  Right?  Hello?  Why are you laughing?

I’m kind of upset that it looks so gorgeous, actually.  If it were hideous, I’d contemplate starting over, but as it is I get lulled into a false sense of security looking at it and I feel like it’ll all come out okay in the end.  I’m not sure how it’ll all come out okay when I’m losing literally feet of knitting, but somehow I’m convinced that it’ll work out.

After all, maybe I was really knitting them a place mat.