This is all very convenient, because, you see, I have a rather large task ahead of me. My brother's pi blanket, which has been growing rather rapidly in the last week, is near the end.
I am quite literally nibbling away at the 576 stitches of this blanket, adding a garter stitch edge by knitting together the eighth stitch of the edge with the last row of the blanket. Doesn't make sense? No it didn't to me before I did it for the first time either.
I'll tell you one thing, in Knitter's Almanac, Elizabeth Zimmermann says, 'You will think at first this is going to be an infinite job....' and well, yes, I do think it will be. The knitting itself is straight forward but it's the huge turning and lifting of this massive blanket every time I complete an 8 stitch row that makes this arduous.
Still, my brother's birthday is a week away so I'm well on track. Sometimes, I stop and look at the blanket unblocked and think it looks like some kind of weird lunar landscape.
But this isn't bad for two weeks' work. A day trip to Sydney last week really knocked over the last part of it.
And so despite the finger-numbing pressure I've put myself under to complete this before my brother turns 30, I've still managed to cast on a couple of other smaller things to relieve the monotony of a plain blanket.
Ishbel was in fact begun, despite trying to talk myself out of it. I chose some beautiful alpaca/silk which was a gift from Julie a couple of years ago. I think it's a perfect match. So far, given it's largely stocking stitch, it's been good for bus knitting.
And for fun, I've cast on another little baby project for my niece, Alice. It's the Seamless Baby Kimono from The Complete Fabrication.
I think I've broken the spell of dark colours I was under for a while there, don't you?
Bells
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