The title says it all, really. Various circumstances are conspiring to make our exit from the US as difficult as possible, and as a result my anxiety levels are through the roof right now. The worst difficulties are with A's UK passport - her US one was no hassle, it arrived 6 days after sending off for it. She still doesn't have her British one. This has all sorts of knock-on effects; we can't book tickets, R can't hand in his notice at work, we can't give notice on our house, we can't arrange definite dates for the handover of our Edinburgh flat etc etc.
The most visible result of this turn of events is that I've retreated into that wonderful psychological state, denial. I could bore you with all the details of how I'm managing to pretend I'm not going to have to organise a trans-continent-trans-Atlantic move within the next 6-8 weeks. Instead, I'll stick to knitting, because even that seems to be affected by my frame of mind.
Exhibit A:
This is Ellis from Norah Gaughan 2. It is only in need of the collar and finishing. It's made using Knitpicks ( oh, how I will miss thee, why don't you ship internationally?) Shine worsted in ebony. I'm not going to mince my words - the charts that made up the peplum for this sucked my will to live. 88 rows of 5 charts. Including row 49 which had 2 mistakes in it, and which took me about 3 years to figure out. I thought it was going to be a quick little mindless knit, but I'm afraid it's never going to fit together in the final finishing. Despite my moaning, I thought this looked really good in the picture in the pamphlet. I pictured myself pottering around the house in my new waistcoat deheading the geraniums, just like the model. Unfortunately, I look nothing like the model, and I've never even owned a waistcoat before. After all this procrastinating about finishing it, I hope I wear it at least once.
Exhibit B:
This is a scarf using my own very overspun handspun. The pattern is from Victorian Lace Today. I can't quite remember the name of the pattern, but it's one of the easy lace scarfs.
Exhibit C:
This is going to be a Print O The Wave Stole by Eunny Jang from her old website. The way the PDF chart is designed has not taken my extreme stage of sleep deprivation into account, so my brain is finding it difficult to see the correct length of the pattern repeat. I think I'm giving this one up for now.
Exhibit D:
I promise, this is the last one for the moment. In real life, there are another two projects also cast-on, but I'm too ashamed to fully publicise the fact. This is going to be Gnarled Oakwoods from the newly minted Twist Collective. There were several patterns there that made me stop, think, and evaluate whether I had time to knit them. It's nice to see different models of business in action too.
So there we have it. I think the cast-on fever I have neatly sums up my attention span at the moment. Time to focus and take deep breaths.
1 comment:
That scarf from VLT is the Scarf on Page 80; it doesn't have a name. It was the second piece of lace I knitted, I think, not nearly as ambitious as you doing the Adamas first.
I wish I could lay hands on my Iris Murdochs, but they're all in a cardboard box in Granton. I hope you like The Sea, the Sea: I expect you need an absorbing book at the moment as well as some absorbing knitting - I hope things start to move forward very soon.
And the Norah waistcoat will all come right in the blocking, honest.
Post a Comment