It's Raining All Over SoCal

What a dismal gloomy day we're having. It started raining at about 0845 and it's still raining almost five hours later. It's not a hard rain, so there's a good chance a lot of it will soak in instead of running off. Fortunately the storm is coming up from the south and west, so there's no chance of snow for us down here, although it's snowing and sticking at the mountain resorts. The storm is dumping snow on the Four Corners area, in particular my birthplace, Durango, CO.

This is all supposed to go away by tomorrow and we'll have a pretty, if cool, day for the UCLA-USC game. If USC (boo, hiss) wins, they'll go to the Rose Bowl. If UCLA (go, Bruins) wins and if Arizona State later loses, then UCLA will go to the Rose Bowl. Since I bleed Bruin blue and gold, you can tell where my heart is. USC is my second favorite, though. (I'm somewhat less partisan about football than basketball.)

The weather may affect the game, though, because it's being played in an outdoor stadium with natural grass. They've gotten about a half-inch of rain down there, which shouldn't affect the field too much, but if it keeps raining the field may get soft. Neither team is very accustomed to soggy fields.

Speaking of soggy fields, did anyone else see this week's Monday Night Football game, where the field was all but under water? On one kick, the ball came down and stuck in the ground. It didn't bounce at all. It was just standing there, right where it hit, pointy end embedded in the glop. All the yard lines and hash marked were washed away, too. I love watching football games played in real weather, particularly pro games. There was a fairly recent game in a driving snow storm (at Lambeau Field, maybe?), so heavy you couldn't see the far side of the field, and another in such thick fog you couldn't even see that far. Now that's football.

Last night I washed and dried a rollerball pen with a load of medium-colored clothes, mostly cotton knits. What a mess! The dryer drum had a lot of black streaks and my clothes were almost all spotted and streaked and smudged with black ink. The dryer cleaned up pretty well, so that I could dry the load in the washer. I gave up about then and didn't even try to re-wash the stained load. I'm going to do that as soon as I post this. Fortunately, a lot of the load was nightgowns and briefs, so the world won't end if they end up with a few gray splotches. However, one of the victims was one of my favorite U-2 (airplane, not band) tees and I'm a little worried about it.

I've once again put aside my Bigfoot Shawl for another project. I got two balls of Suri Dream handpainted in Rose Quartz in my recent order from Knit Picks. The box showed up on Tuesday and I managed to resist until last night (Thursday), but I caved in and started a scarf. This yarn is just beautiful. It's really soft and so light, but still warm. The colors are very good, too. The scarf is just garter stitch with slipped-stitch selvages, 24 stitches on US 11 needles. It's about 8 in. wide and I've got about 24 in. knitted already. I've weighed the ball of yarn a couple of times and I think I'm getting about an inch of scarf per gram. I'm thinking that I should order another ball of yarn and make two six-foot scarves. I'll try to get a reasonable photo tomorrow if it's sunny enough.

I Had A Dream

Or maybe a nightmare. About knitting. I rarely remember my dreams but this one was special. I share them even less often, too, but I figured this one would amuse knitters and their friends. I think it's funny now, but it wasn't at the time.

I'm knitting the Bigfoot Shawl in black fingering weight Gloss. The pattern is a variant of feather and fan and has a whole bunch of *k1, yo* on the first row. There's something I occasionally do on the purl row back that doesn't catch the k1 right, so that on the third or fourth row the weight of the shawl pulls the stitches apart and makes a big hole (yo, k1, yo, after all). This is pretty easy to pick up, just reknit the center stitch and then pick up the other two, but it's annoying and I keep doing it. It's happened not just on this shawl but on two others, too.

Anyway, about the dream. I dreamed that I was knitting away on this shawl (except that it had morphed into a triangular shawl) and it pulled apart right where I was knitting. Then I started tugging on the edges and the stitches started popping apart all over the shawl. My beautiful lace shawl was falling apart and there wasn't anything I could do to stop it. And each time it happened it made a most unyarnlike "pop" sound. I was horrified and panicky. Pop, pop, pop!

Then I woke up, with this vivid image still in my mind. It was all I could do not to hop out of bed in the middle of the night and hurry to my knitting to see how it looked. When I did pick my knitting up later, I checked it over very carefully and tugged gently on the edge to see what would happen. Fortunately, nothing did.

Not The Kind Of Fantasy I Was Looking For

I've been knitting away quite diligently on my Diamond Fantasy Shawl for the last four or five days. The day before yesterday, just as I finished the 18th row of the sixth repeat of the 20-row pattern repeat, I held my lovely shawl up so I could admire it. I discovered I'd screwed up an entire row. Twenty rows back.

I tried (oh, how I tried) to convince myself that no one would ever notice, that I only noticed because I was looking for errors, even if someone did notice it wasn't that bad an error, and so on. All the time I was coming up with these rationalizations I had a nasty sinking feeling that there was no way in the world that I was going to be able to leave that row in my shawl. I was just going to have to rip out twenty rows and correct it.

I even tried the acid test. I held the shawl up for my husband to look at, telling him there was an error in it and could he see it? He studied it briefly and then ran his finger along the offending row and I knew I was doomed to frog.

So I did. An entire day of knitting gone in a few minutes.

Mid-morning today I finally got back to where I'd been when I found the error and now I'm halfway through the next pattern repeat. I'm more than halfway done and I'm pretty sure I'll have it done well beforehand.

I'm so sure of this, in fact, that I ordered the interlocking foam squares for blocking from Amazon.com. I'd already bought two pounds of 1.5-in. T pins on eBay, so all I need now is the shawl, a bit of beading cable, and a yardstick.

No photo for this post because it doesn't look that much different. Maybe tomorrow, since I've got some new yarn to show, too.