Sunday Evening Post

This morning we all took ourselves to church and had a very nice morning of it. For once we weren't in a huge hurry and didn't arrive a few minutes late. It means so much to me that we were all there. And I had to admit this morning, as I looked around at my fellow church-goers--we have reached that point where we have it fairly easy. We have no babes in arms--just the occasional kindergardener-in-lap. No one cried, or threw a fit, or tried to take a fistful of bread from the Sacrament tray. There was noone to take to nursery, and noone to take with us because they were too young for nursery. Max took himself off to Sunday school and the twins only put up a token fuss about going to Primary (although Milo managed to escape from his classroom for about ten minutes around 11:30).

After we got back home we had sandwiches and I settled in with the Shetland shawl to do the last few rows--but it was 437 stitches (or so) per row and 6 rows of garter stitch. As much as I was eager to finish, I was soooo sleepy . . . . zzzzz. I took a nap. Woke up and kept knitting. Casting off took forever. Around 7:30 or so, I was done. We took a picture of it unblocked (nothing much to look at) and then I washed it WELL as it had traveled in many a knitting bag and frankly, the neck portion of it already looked dingy to me. I spent another hour blocking it (I soon grasped how blocking wires would have helped this effort--but I don't have any. So instead I used a couple million blocking pins.) and tomorrow I'll have some photos of it done.

And now, I'm going to settle down to unwind for a few minutes with the garter-stitch afghan. I didn't like how it was turning out and I hadn't knit on it in forever, so the other day I took scissors to it (the yarn is mohair-like in its fluffiness and didn't want to rip back easily, besides, I'd been weaving in the ends as I went AND we're really only talking about 6 to 8 inches of work on size 19 60" needles. It was maybe half a skein of yarn I tossed.) picked up the stitches again, rewound the rest of the ball of yarn that had fallen apart in the knitting bag over the past few months, and started again. The yarn is kind of pumpkin colored and the idea I had to have random stripes of green shot here and there through the blanket wasn't working. So I cut back far enough to cut out all of the green. I'll continue on again with just the pumpkin until it's big enough or I'm out of pumpkin--then do a bottom border of green and call it done.

Still, it's GOBS of garter stitch and I don't really expect to finish the blanket for a very, very long time.

After a couple of weeks of that shawl though, an hour of garter stitch sounds perfect.