Life With Matty (and other stories): Not-Done

[The Wart] now discovered, with a helpless feeling, that there were no words for happiness, for freedom, for liking, nor were there any words for their opposites. . . . The nearest he could get to Right or Wrong, even, was to say Done or Not-Done. . . . Later on, the Wart discovered that there were only two qualifications in the [ant] language, Done and Not-Done--which applied to all questions of value. If the seeds which the collectors found were sweet, they were Done seeds. If somebody had doctored them with corrosive sublimate, they would have been Not-Done seeds, and that was that.*

When last you read me, I was Done! I had just finished some work and was reveling in my freedom, temporary though it was. Now I'm back to my regular M.O., with heaps of work and projects that are Not-Done and probably will stay that way, at the rate things are going. For starters, some sort of voodoo has been worked on my computer and I cannot open my photo library. I've had to resort to the circuitous and duplicative method of uploading the same photos to my iPad, using said iPad to magic the photos off to Flickr, and then plopping the photos from Flickr into the blog. It's like reaching over your head with your right arm to scratch your left ear. Or, to put it in terms of modern travel, flying 600 miles west to Chicago just to catch a flight to Miami, which was almost directly south of us in the first place.

Ridiculous as the method may be, I've managed to jam a bunch of photos into this post so that anyone who cares to may have a good laugh at my expense. Not that I'm feeling bitter, or anything.

Exhibit A:

An ingenious solution to the Team Hat that was plaguing me in the last post. It turned out that I had a commercial yarn in the right colors, quantities, and weights to make a non-handspun hat for Isa. So I cast on for the Turn a Square hat (see the way-cool squares at the top?)

with the idea that I would make it two layers--meaning I could use two color schemes-- and Isa would have a hat that was reversible, super warm, and color coordinated with her various uniforms. In an unprecedented burst of ingenuity, I cast on using two strands of the yarn (which is black, not blue as it appears in this willfully deceptive photo) and 2/3 the number of stitches called for in the pattern. After the ribbing, I separated the strands onto two needles, one for the inside layer and one for the outside layer, and increased into every other stitch to get the number of stitches called for in the pattern. Yay me.

I worked a few inches of the outside in black and gold and found out that my needle size was too small and I was knitting a 14 inch hat for a 23 inch head. RIIIIIIIIIP. Second try: right size needles and marvellously quick progress. I finished the black and yellow side and showed Isa the hat for her approval. Or disapproval, if you prefer, since there were entirely too many yellow stripes for her taste. Being a kind and generally accommodating child, she said she would wear it anyway, but after I finished the red side--with half as many stripes-- I decided that no girl on the verge of her teen years should be burdened with a hat that looked like the back end of a bumblebee. RIIIIIIIIIP. I plowed through the reworked yellow side this morning and tucked in my ends only to find, while stuffing the inside into the outside, that the red side was significantly longer than the yellow side and that the corners (square top hat, remember?) were skewed by 8 stitches because I moved the marker by a stitch every time I hid the jog in the stripe.

RIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIP!

And that is where we stand with that: Not-Done, in so many ways. By the time I finish with this--assuming of course that I don't flush it down the toilet first--I will have knit the equivalent of four hats, with only one head covering to show for the effort. Wildly amusing, really, since I originally planned to make a double-knit hat and have instead doubled my hat knitting.

All is not regression and despair, however. Exhibit B is the second toe of the Yellow Socks. Third toe, really, since I had to knit the toe of the first sock twice, but let's not dwell on that.

It has so far been a lovely and cooperative little toe and I'm beginning to believe that it might, someday soon, grow to be a much more cooperative sock than the first one, which, after weeks and weeks of being Not-Done, is now finished, although I am not yet emotionally ready to declare it Done.

Here is a picture that is close enough to allow you to see the free-range cat hairs that plague all of my knitwear.

And here is a close-up of the new-to-me sole flap with funky heel decrease technique, the one part of the sock that was Done right from the beginning.

See the upside down date in the picture? It took quite a bit of manoeuvering to photograph the back of my own foot.

Exhibit C? A mass of nondescript spaghetti-ish, beady-ish knitting. It is part of a mystery knit along, so all I know is that it will be a shawl and that each row is now somewhere between 600 and 700 stitches and requires my full concentration, which is why this bugger is very definitely Not-Done.