Friday I started a new project. It was a simple project utilizing a fun yarn I had just picked up at my friend Theresa's new yarn shop: Out of the Loop. It is basically a bulky wool yarn, meant to be knit on size 15 to 19 needles, with felted balls of wool tied periodically throughout the skein.
I intended to make a simple cowl and thought it would be a fun hospital-knitting project. Little did I know that this simple project would prove to be my lifeline on a rather difficult day.
But first the specs:
Yarn: U-Knitted Nations Giant Purls 1 skein equals 80 yards
Needle: size 17 circular needle.
Pattern: a simple tube. I cast on 48 stitches, joined them and simply knit until I ran out of yarn.
I am very happy with the results of this project although it is far from perfect. If you look closely you will see quite a bit of variation in my tension and the general texture of my knitting. As I said it proved to be a difficult Friday.
My tension at the beginning was rather consistently loose. I am, by nature, a loose knitter and I was focusing on trying to keep the stitches loose as I wanted a rather soft fabric with nice drape for this cowl and I feared it would become too stiff. I actually think the felted purls fall more nicely where the scarf is more loosely knit.
The day began innocuously enough waiting for the doctor to come in with the results of a bevy of tests. The results were not good, were not what I wanted to hear, what I expected to hear. My knitting would be shoved aside, then picked up again and I would knit desperately, as if wrapping a small bit of yarn around a stick would make the world right again. My tension varied widely during this period, although I was not aware of it at the time.
Then after many discussions with many doctors, I entered a phase of fierce determination. We would figure this out. I had a list of rehabilitation hospitals to research and I was determined to do the best job possible over the weekend. But first I had to finish the cowl. For some reason I felt I could not walk out that door, I could not move forward, until I finished that project as if dangling yarn was an omen of doom. My hands were holding the needles tightly and my gauge became much tighter and more evenly spaced again as I raced to the finish. The end result was that the cast-off end of the cowl is smaller than the cast-on end. But it works and I rather like it this way.
I've had many projects that remind me of the place and time of their knitting. I treasure these sweaters: the sweater I knit on a flight to Paris. The cabled sweater in Noro Kureyon that I knit as we drove around western Texas the year we went to Big Bend. The sweater I knit on my first Amazon Cruise. Now I have this cowl, and although it does not remind me of exotic locales, it is equally treasured, its inconsistencies speaking volumes.
I kept that cowl in the bottom of my purse all weekend as I toured rehab centers. I would occasionally reach my hand down into my purse just to feel it there as if the softness of the wool and the nubbly felted balls would help me with my decision. At one point on Sunday I even wore the cowl as I had run out without a coat and there was a cold wind. The warm cowl brightened my spirits as well as my neck as the wind whipped about. Every stitch of that wool was a piece of the puzzle, every stitch would help me make the right decision.
