The Fine Art of Procrastiknitting

  Not much to report today. I did make it to the sleeve separation state, which, when you’re a fat girl like me, is a relief! Knitting all those sleeve stitches along with all of the body stitches is a challenge when you get to the point where you’re ready to separate the sleeves. But I made it (yay!) and now I can just work on finishing the cropped body before moving on to Sleeve Island. I’ve been knitting for close to 50 years, picked it back up seriously  about 20 years ago, but I still have that moment of panic when I reach the sleeve separation state because I don’t think it’s going to fit. I measure what I have for the sleeves, and I measure what I have for the body, and they both are coming up short for my arms and body. And then I remember that I always have to cast on those armhole stitches to make up for the difference.  Those are all cast on, my stitch markers are all moved, and I’m ready to just start churning out row after row after row. Good thing I can watc...

There’s a line in one of my favorite movies, The American President, that seems appropriate right now. The President is dating a lobbyist who has been working on an environmental bill. He has been trying to pass crime prevention legislation, and when it was clear that that legislation would pass only if he shelved the environmental bill, he folded. She did not take it well.  He said, “I don’t want to lose you over this.”  Her reply was, “Mr. President.you got bigger problems than losing me. You just lost my vote.” Well, Democrats, you just lost my vote. After nearly 50 years as a registered Democrat, I am now an independent. The capitulation by too many Democrats on the Charlie Kirk resolution was the last of many, many straws.  Look, I get it. You’re afraid that if you voted against that resolution, then it would look like you’re voting in favor of political violence. You felt you had to swallow all the words praising Charlie Kirk in order not to rile up the other side a...

  This is not a Finished Object Friday post.  This is a Fuck It Friday post. I knit this shawl about 10 years ago. I don’t remember what the pattern was; I need to search my knitting books to see if I can find it. I knit it is using Fyberspates Gleem lace, a 55%-45% blend of bluefaced Leicester and silk and one of my favorite lace weight yarns for shawls.  I hadn’t worn it for a while after I retired, and then when I started organizing (and culling) my knitwear, I saw this: Yeah. But we aren’t at the fuck it part yet.  I put it in the naughty drawer for a while (2 years? 3?More?). For some reason I decided to pull it out this week. I found the end I wove in after binding off and started frogging. By the time I unraveled past that mess, I ended up with a few decent sized balls of yarn and very little waste. I also had most of the edging pattern left, so I could probably figure it out enough to knit a few rows and then bind off and still have roughly the same size sh...

  I thought I’d try something new, short blogs about things that make me go, “Hmm…”. To that end: It’s now harder to get a COVID vaccine than it is to buy a gun.  OK, that is admittedly an imperfect comparison, but if you are under 65 (maybe higher now, I haven’t checked the news today), you need a prescription to get a COVID shot unless you have certain preconditions, and there is no guarantee that your health insurance will cover it. That, of course, is the vast majority of our population.  The only restrictions on buying a handgun is being a felon. Or being committed to a mental institution involuntarily. Or being a fugitive from the law. Kind of the opposite of the vast majority of our population.  So, yeah, it’s easier to kill someone else than it is to protect yourself. Make it make sense.

  Made a fair amount of progress this week. I should be ready to separate the sleeves in a few days.  As I said last week, I changed the pattern a bit. The pattern calls for the lace in the front and back; I just put lace in the front and replaced the lace part of the repeat with stockinette stitch in the back. The pattern does have an interesting neckline construction. Rather being the same front and back like many top-down pullovers, after knitting the ribbing, you use short rows to build up the back neck and the side of the front. You can’t really see the back here, but it is noticeably different than the front. I changed from wrap&turn to German short rows because in general I like the look of them better. I’m not terribly happy with them here, but I’m going to rely on the knitting myth “That will block right out.” (You can see the double stitches in the lower left near the ribbing.  I’m also not thrilled with the raglan “seam.” I normally do them with a m1r on th...

  How do you knit a cardigan in a day? By making it really really small. My housekeeper has a five-year-old stepdaughter. I had a 60 year-old dollhouse that my dad had built me when I was well, about five years old. We decided the two had to meet, so I gave her my dollhouse. My dad built this dollhouse from scratch when I was just a little girl, and I have kept it through multiple moves over the years. At one point I did a little work on it and built some furniture from kits to go in it, but I just didn’t really have the time or the inclination to do it justice, and it’s been sitting in my attic for far too long. So I asked my housekeeper if she thought her stepdaughter would be interested and she was! She immediately painted it yellow (coincidentally, my house - also a Cape Cod - is yellow), and started working on the inside. After just about a week, she had the living room just about finished.  There’s vinyl flooring, a tiled surround on the fireplace, she put in the windows...

Yesterday, a right wing pundit was shot and killed by an unknown assailant. The right is metaphorically foaming at the mouth in outrage over his death. Yesterday, two school children in Colorado were shot by a classmate who then shot and killed himself. It barely made the news. Why is there so much outrage about the right wing pundit being shot but not the schoolchildren? Is it because the right wing believes as the pundit did that a few gun deaths are worth it to protect the second amendment? Well, as long as it isn’t one of their own. Or is it because we are all just so inured to the death of school children by gunfire that it barely pricks our collective consciousness? According to CNN , as of yesterday, there were 47 school shootings in the United States, about half on college campuses and half in K-12 schools. 77 students have been injured. 19 have died.  And the collective ire from the right for those 96 victims of gun violence is less than that for one right wing pundit ...

For some reason, I don’t knit a lot of pullovers. I have something like 18 tank tops for summer, and at least a half dozen cardigans in the closet, but only three pullovers, and one of them I just finished up a couple of weeks ago. I decided I want to try to up my pullover game so I have more options for things to wear in the winter. To that end, I started Thea Colman’s  ( BabyCocktails )White Russian pullover late last week. I’ve done a couple of her patterns, and I liked the simple lace pattern on this one. It was also a top down knit, which I usually do for baby knits, but rarely do when knitting for myself for some reason. I also like that it is designed as a somewhat cropped sweater, since at 5’ 3”, I’m a somewhat cropped person. I do plan on shortening the sleeves to three-quarter length. I also plan on having the lace pattern just in front, while doing the K5 P1 K1 P1 Pattern across the back. That’s just a little easier on my hands than doing the lace all around, and pretty ...

  I want to try to return to blogging. I haven’t done it since I retired, but I find sometimes I have more to say than I can say in a Bluesky post. So we’ll see how this goes.  Since I am a retired bleeding heart liberal knitter living with inflammatory arthritis, whatever I come up with will be skewed heavily in that direction, whether it’s my current WIP, my view on the state of the disunion, or how I cope with chronic illness. If it’s not your cup of tea, you don’t need to read it. I tend to be both opinionated and acerbic, which also tends to piss people off.  I retired from my day job as an instructional designer at a community college in 2019, the day before I turned 60. I like being able to say I retired while I was still in my 50s. My retirement timing was fortuitous, since it was the year before the pandemic, and if I had still been working in 2020, I would’ve been the one responsible for getting all the college’s courses online almost instantaneously when the co...