Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Drip. Drip. Drip.

We're thawing here. You can hear water. There are puddles. It's ugly as sin out there. Everything is wet and gray and brown and dirty green and I love it.

I'm so encouraged, in fact, that last night I unearthed the Endpaper Mitts.

It's not as bad as I remember. I only frogged three rows beyond the thumb gusset. I had it in my head I had lost an entire repeat but (and I find this so exciting), I knew by the chart where I needed to resume. (I know. I know. Small minds, cheap thrills.) Okay, so I picked the wrong place the first time. But I hadn't completed even one needle worth of knitting before I noticed I was repeating the row below. The woman begins to learn to read, not just the paper pattern, but what her hands are doing. She progresses.

And this high-wire knitting is apparently like riding a bicycle. I was afraid I might have forgotten how to carry the yarn in both hands. Or how to pick up the yarn from my left. I was envisioning having to untwist the previous rows knitting in order to get my left hand stitches to orient in the same directions as my right hand. Didn't happen. I even remembered how I'm most comfortable carrying the left-hand yarn. Which is a good thing since it's nearly as idiosyncratic as how I do my right hand carry.


Of course, now that I've worked back to the point of all my previous mistakes, comes the tricky part: the thumb gusset and remembering to mirror image the chart for the third and fourth needles. No. Let me rephrase. That's not where my knitting will get a little interesting. If I'm right about understanding how to work the increases (big if), the mirror imaging should be fine. It's when I go back to the pattern as given that I expect to encounter repeated lapses in short-term memory.

Oh, and lest I give Chicago in mid-February less than its due, "dart [your] sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky."*

If you look up, it's beautiful.

* Walt Whitman. "Miracles" from Leaves of Grass. 1900.

2 comments:

Diane H said...

You might almost talk yourself into those bumps on the branches being buds!

Very nice resumption. Go with the mitt.

Shelly said...

We are about to get clobbered with 4 to 14 inches of snow here in WI, no spring for us yet!

I like the colors on your mittens very much.