Saturday, June 28, 2008

I Can Hear You Calling

I have been pretty productive lately, knitwise. The gargantuan sleeve is still in the bottom of my knitting bag, but I cast on the Stained Glass Bag, which is a lot of fun. I have one more row to finish before I start the bottom and I think I can finish it this weekend.

That being said, I also have three sweaters, a pair of socks, a pair of mittens, and a stole on the needles that need to be finished up. That's not including the jacket-gone-wrong. Which brings me to the Blue Heron yarn.

Ahhh, the Blue Heron rayon metallic. I hate rayon and I'm not a fan of metallic yarn, but as soon as I saw the Blue Heron, I wanted to touch it. As soon as I touched it, I wanted to buy it. It's so soft and just has a hint of gold running through it. The colorway I bought looks like a peacock feather, with dark green, purple, and gold. I'd put up a picture for you, but pictures don't do this yarn justice. I spent more on one 550 yard skein of Blue Heron than I've spent on any other single skein of yarn I own, and I still think it was worth every penny.

For two weeks, the Blue Heron has been sitting in the basket in my office. I can hear it calling to me. It wants to be made into a clapotis shawl. I've been working very hard on the stained glass bag, but every day I've spent just a little time reading up on the Clapotis. I looked at a lot of different finished Clapotis shawls and read about modifications. I looked at all the Clapotis shawls people made with Blue Heron rayon metallic and read all of the comments. I printed out the pattern from Knitty and some notes from Ravelry projects discussing the modifications I want to make.

I started bargaining with the Blue Heron. First, I promised it I would make the Clapotis once the stained glass bag, circle jacket and socks were done. The Blue Heron was not amused. Then I offered to cast it on as soon as the circle jacket and bag were done. The Blue Heron just laughed mockingly and turned away. Finally, I begged the Blue Heron to consider waiting until the stained glass bag was done. The Blue Heron simply ignored me and kept up its siren call.

This morning, after a long struggle with my conscience, I decided that I could cast on the Clapotis this evening. I reasoned that the stained glass bag was almost finished, and I decided I would give the Clapotis to someone as a Christmas gift in order to justify starting yet another project.

I took out the skein, untied it and held it in my lap for a while. It is so beautiful that I started to wind it by hand just so I could touch it for a while. I quickly realized that even the beautiful hand of of Blue Heron rayon metallic was not worth winding for 550 yards, so I pulled out the ball winder and got it set up. I even convinced Lily to help me by turning the winder handle while I held the skein.

I am firmly convinced there is a knitting goddess. I think the knitting goddess would like me to balance out my selfish desire to knit things for myself with my selfless desire to make things for others. I think She is unhappy with the recent spate of projects I've made for myself. I think She totally knows that, even though I promised myself I would give the Clapotis as a Christmas gift, it's probably NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. In other words, you just can't fool the knitting goddess.

Several things happened as I started to wind up the Blue Heron (which was cheering me on, by the way). First, Jim cut his finger pretty badly and asked me to look up his injury on the internet to see if he ought to go to the ER. Second, while I was in the office looking up Jim's injury, Lily helped me out by winding some of the Blue Heron. The knitting goddess smiled somewhere. When I came back into the dining room and told Jim he should probably go to the ER, I saw this on the dining room table:



I worked on unwinding this knot (which is in the middle of the skein, by the way) from 3:30pm until 8:00pm. I stopped only to serve the kids dinner and to vacuum up the mess afterwards. At 7:00pm, I gave up and cut the yarn. I will end up with 3 skeins of this yarn -- the part on the ball winder, the tangled part, and the bulk of the yarn that was left in the skein after the knitting goddess struck me down. It is still not untangled. I was planning on casting it on tonight so that I would have something simple to work on when we have company tomorrow and Monday. I now think it quite likely that I will not finish straightening out this mess until well after our company has gone. As a result, I will be casting on the second sleeve of the circle jacket and working on that instead.

Jim did go to the ER and he's fine. He just needed a little super glue to fix up his cut. Of course, it took Melrose-Wakefield Hospital 3 hours to come to that conclusion. He would have been better off going to the walk-in clinic at MGH, even though it's farther away. I guess we both learned a lesson today. Jim's lesson: Unless it's an emergency, take the extra time to drive into Boston for medical care. My lesson: Don't mess with the knitting gods, you selfish bitch!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Never heard of that yarn - so of course I had to go to Ravelry and look it up - wow, it's gorgeous and is the perfect Clapotis yarn.

I don't know how you manage (esp. with two young ones) to have so many projects on the needles and so many projects that you FINISH! I've got four projects going right now and two of them have been on the needles for about a year (one of them, a pair of socks for my husband, is only about 6 inches from being done, too). -Michelle

Unknown said...

I just knit any time I'm not playing with the kids. It also helps that I'm up to two knit nights a week, and have recently started playdates with knitters.