Sometimes people can be so inconsiderate. Recently two of my colleagues have each made the major decision to retire – and all without giving even a moment’s thought to what impact this might have on my knitting schedule.
You see, I had offered to make Rod (one of the soon to be retirees) a scarf for winter. Winter in Melbourne doesn’t really kick in until June so I thought I had plenty of time. I bought some beautiful 4ply (sport weight) Zarina in a marled charcoal grey and planned to make something very intricate. Millions of tiny cables – something like that. I know there is no way I’ll be able to complete that in the three weeks before he leaves so I need a backup plan – fast. Looks like I get to go yarn shopping today (yay!) for some nice squishy aran weight maybe?
The second offender (sorry, beloved colleague who is about to retire), is Lorraine. Lorraine has been with the company forever and she helped me a lot when I decided to re-learn to knit as an adult. I credit Lorraine with getting me to hold and throw the yarn properly instead of dropping it and picking it up again for each stitch. For Lorraine I have made a Camomile Lawn tea cosy. I have the body of the cosy made but I only have a week to finish the flowers and leaves for the top as well as find the perfect teapot. I think I know what I’ll be doing this weekend.
It probably doesn’t sound like a lot of knitting – finish up an 80% complete tea cosy and make a scarf – but on top of getting the Tegan Beret just right and working my way through a jumper for my sister’s birthday it all adds up.
The plan of attack is to get the beret out of the way first. The one I’m working on should be the last. I’ve tweaked the stitch count slightly and am knitting from the typeset pattern to pick up any errors I missed in proofreading. The one I’m knitting now will be the one that my friend Renata models in the pictures. I’ll take pictures on Tuesday and get the pattern onto Ravelry that night. I’m really happy with this Beret and despite the number of times I’ve re-knit it for testing, I’d quite like to make another one for myself. We’ll see – I might move on to one of the other ideas I have for a beret. I might just resist the urge to keep knitting berets and finish the tea cosy or knit the scarf instead. That would be the sensible solution.
Unfortunately this weekend there will be a lot of disruptions. I’m kind of sick at the moment and would just like to spend the weekend in bed with my knitting and the cat. My partner’s brother and sister in law are visiting though, which means I can’t just say “Seeya, I’m off to bed for two days” and ignore them. I will definitely try to do this but I may not have a lot of success. Houseguests seem to expect to be fed and spoken too for some reason and this will have a big impact on my knitting time. Still, I’ll have all of Sunday and two hours of Stitch and Bitch tonight at my LYS.
That’s really all for this update. I’ll let you know what yarn I buy for Rod’s scarf.
