Crisis + Time = Humor

I’ll let you know when yesterday has become funny. Yesterday was the kind of day that made having to break into my apartment the night before one daughter’s wedding, seem hilarious. Or losing a toenail fifteen minutes before the other’s wedding began.

[So, something like six to ten years of composting before this guano becomes topsoil? In the meantime, hand me one of those lemons; I’m busy making lemonade.]

We now return you to your regularly scheduled knitting content. Long-time readers will vaguely remember the Elann Crop Cardi, begun in a moment of weakness after seeing Celtic Memory's lovely œuvre. [Last photo in the post.] The body worked in its entirety and the sleeves half-done and the whole blessed thing frogged after I stopped wading in the river Denial. Which meant frogging fourteen triangular points at the hem of the sweater. Which translates into thirteen shortish lengths of yarn that, added together, constitute an impressive chunk of one skein. Some of which I finger-tatted into rustic flowers, which I am now also frogging.

Using the same Russian join as I am to connect the individual balls, I am interspersing these shorter frogged bits with the balls when I reach the end of one, or when I come to a knot in the middle of a ball, of which there have been a few. [Not at all what I would have expected from the good folks at Berroco.] It is the perfect splice for a tape yarn like this: strong, and virtually invisible. A little fiddly, perhaps, but worth it in the name of frugality, and we know how much gets done in that name around here.

I would show you a picture of the shawl in progress, but those of you who are lace knitters know how unprepossessing a length of unblocked lace can seem. Suffice it to say that we are still knitting in Ugly Duckling mode, but when we are done, this shawl will break a man’s heart the way the blow from a Swan’s beak would break his arm.

[And now it occurs to me to wonder: do I want to knit this as a one-way fabric, or do I want to knit two halves and graft them in the middle?] No, no, no, Ms. Ravelled. We want to be heartbreakingly lovely in this shawl, not swaddled in it until the nice men in the white coats arrive. Basta! [Enough!]

Edited to add that after running the final error check on the tax return that I was going to have to fork over $106 with [hence the procrastination], and entering a few simple answers, we are now getting a $608 refund. Don’t everybody line up with your hand out, all at once!