AH HA Moment

[sardil]

Lying in bed last night I had an AH HA moment. The events of the day were replaying in one little corner of my brain while I thumbed through EZ's KNITTING AROUND book newly purchased this week from that gal at Soft Horizons ( you know who I mean, some one who's name starts with K, I always walk out with more goodies than I intended). I was snuggled down under the covers with my mattress heating pad on HI reading away......

An annoying itch in my brain was churning over a discussion at Theo's earlier in the day with Mariana and Joan. We were going on about the dropped stitch effect on the edges of sweaters and scarfs, particularly about making a 55" long tube scarf ala Harry Potter. My 8 yr old granddaughter Shealynn wanted "anything Harry Potter" for Christmas. So off I set to create a gift sure to please. Miles and miles of mind numbing stockinette stitch, around and around, again and again. Not wanting to be finger drummingly bored, I threw in a couple of slip stitches equally placed on the sides to afford a pleasing fold line for the tube. Surely I wouldn't get bored paying attention to the stitch markers and as an added bonus each time I came to the bobbles (a delightful pearl and silver one with a beautiful crystal dangling from the end made by Samanatha; and the second one made by another friend) I got the added pleasure of thinking of those friends. It just seemed so right!

Knitting around and around..... reading KNITTING AROUND............mindless knitting....AH HA!!!!!!! I COULD go faster if I didn't have to stop twice each round to move a marker (albeit a lovely one), determine whether or not this was the row that needed to be knitted or slipped.....Faster? Twenty five inches into a tube scarf 7" wide is starting to take on a different flavor, hmmm.....something in say a dark chocolate "let's get the sucker done" flavor? True, I would have to resort to dropping stitches on each side when I was done and then manuevering that long, narrow tube so I could slip stitches up the side. Now even that is starting to sound like fun! We'll see if the next 25 plus inches go any faster and I'll save my favorite stitch markers for another project.

[foolish]

Ha! I just double-d dare you to measure it out. Too late on this scarf, of course. But you could do one where you slipped-as-you-knit on one side and dropped the other side down five or six feet and picked it back up again. And just time it.
Maybe it's this slipping every-other-row that makes me happy enough with round n round stockinette or even garter back n forth. You may have noticed that much (not all, but bloody close to it) of my current knitting is in garter. No slipping stuff there. Just kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk to your heart's content. Yum.
m, who started a garter stitch square today -- not having enough else to do.
Oh, and I did as Joan suggeted and wash/blocked the afghan. I still have to do two full more rounds. But we're close. And now I know approximately how long to wash/block/dry the silly thing. Not too long.
m