Stumbling over the end of the week
Had the house myself when I got home last night, since Mom was out playing darts till past the time I went to bed. (She told me this morning, she thought she'd be knocked out of the tournament early and go home, but what with drawing a skilled partner and playing very well, they came in second place and won $60. And so she lost sleep last night, but gets to sleep well tonight and not be awakened by Aidyn tomorrow morning -- as she'd warned Lauren well in advance, she's not going to have the energy to give up a night and a day chasing a toddler if she's working full-time again.) I made it to bed at 11pm, which I thought wasn't really making up for the 1am bedtime Wednesday night, but I woke up half an hour before my alarm started going off so I guess I'm in good shape sleepwise this week after all.
Tried casting on for my Irtfa'a Shawl last night, but had completely blocked out the trauma of the bird's eye edging from last time I worked this pattern. It's only mildly annoying to have to do on the sides of the main shawl (instead of getting to slack off with a few stitches of plain garter stitch or some such, as with my last few shawls), but the cast-on involves making a long strip with the edging chart and then picking up stitches down the side. So I'll have to settle in and get comfortable with this little pattern, which actually isn't that bad -- I was just having a bit of a headache getting started, since I do a backwards loop cast-on for everything and the chart is demanding that I do a yarnover and a double yarnover right there in the first row. So I decided to cheat slightly and knit one row and then start the pattern, which would probably have solved the problem except that I was also trying to weave in the loose end from my caston as I went. I think I was getting confused as to which row I was on at a few points, trying to pay attention to the chart and the loose end and the show I was watching. I was close to the end of the show anyway at that point, so I figured the best thing to do would be to frog it, try again later, and shift gears to putting plain stockinette rows onto my Librarian Kneesock. (I'm thinking the knitting a row before I start the chart is a good idea, and has the added benefit of leaving the loose end at the edge of the strip I'll be picking up stitches from to start the main body of the shawl, rather than sticking out at the free edge of what's going to wind up being the neckband. I'll probably be able to weave it in while I'm working my way back up the strip.)
Also, while trying to google up instructions for doing bird's eye edging (this chart is simpler than the one the Irtfa'a pattern uses) I turned up the pattern designer's blog post about creating the Irtfa'a Shawl pattern. It's an interesting read with the experience of having knit the complete pattern before -- in fact, since the finished shawl lives draped over the back of my deskchair at work, I was able to grab an edge and pull it around to compare to the photos in the blog post. Evidently I did a bad job of blocking on the bottom edging pattern -- I didn't realize the points were supposed to be pulled out at a slant to look like flight feathers, so I pulled them straight down from the base of the shawl. (Also there's the thing where I completely forgot to swap to a smaller needle when I reached the final edging, so it's a bit larger than it should have been. Though I should have been working the entire pattern on a bigger needle, actually -- hmm, come to think of it, the Shetland wool I used for my first shawl wasn't that much thicker than the KnitPicks laceweight I'm using for the new one, so maybe I should think hard about bumping up my needle size now, before I've actually got something knitted that I would have to rip out. Again.)
Link from my Yahoo! page:
Ice Age baby mammoth on display at French museum -- "After tens of thousands of years under the Siberian frost, a baby woolly mammoth is taking a summer vacation in southeast France. Baby Khroma, one of the oldest intact mammoths ever found, went on display in a French museum Friday - after it underwent special tests to ensure it was no longer bearing the anthrax believed to have killed it."
Doubt I'm getting out of here very soon tonight. Ah, well. Not that I had any real plans for the evening -- maybe trying again to start the Irtfa'a Shawl, and seeing if I can finish up with the last few eps of Avatar: The Last Airbender?
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