Do you remember during the '70's, a picture of Richard M. Nixon with a caption that read, '
Would you buy a used car from this man?' I thought of that when we moved from one house to another twelve years ago, and my husband, loving though he is, moved my refrigerator out from the wall in front of six women I worked with at the time. I thought, 'they'll never eat a meal I've cooked again.' If memory serves, there was a dehydrated mouse under there. Gross.
I tell you this because I'm outing myself right now regarding UFOs. Embarrassment aside, this is a picture of my dining room table. Last week, I promised my husband I would finally clean out all of the knitting bags from the coat closet. It was sort of a deal; he would clean his business papers off the dining room table and I would clean out the closet. However, the contents of the closet ended up on the dining room table. There are more than twenty bags on the table. I found at least ten projects out of my hand spun. There are socks on circs, bags to felt, two sweaters, a lace shawl, several scarves, and something unidentified. I have no idea what it is.
There is a vest from Folk Vests that needs a skein of hand dyed yarn to be dyed, an entrelac jacket out of our hand dyed that is on too small needles and I am working up the courage to rip, about five projects out of Manos from the '70's, including a messenger bag and a dog sweater, several things in Shetland that I forgot I had started, an Einstein jacket, several Elizabeth Zimmerman things, a 'faux' Entrelac hat that Myra gave me to knit a few years ago but I don't think I understood the pattern back then; maybe I could do it now. There is a chenille 'thing', a commercial wool boucle 'thing', and a silk blend 'thing'. I am going to rip them out because, again, I have no idea what I was doing. It could be I was designing on the needles and then had a brain fart and thought better of it.
To get back to the dining room, notice the loom folded up against the wall with another, smaller loom on top of it. Then, if you look really hard, you can see in the left foreground, yet another loom, this one a 16 harness. Look, I cooked for thirty seven years and served a hot meal to any one within shouting distance. We don't even need a kitchen now, let alone a dining room, so what better thing to do than use it to organize my knitting??? I refuse to feel guilty, I refuse to feel guilty, I refuse to feel guilty.
Abigail's washcloth inspired by EZ's Square Baby Blanket. Just needs Kitchnering. Knitted by moi.
Elizabeth Zimmerman for the masses......Miryeya finishing the first half of the triangle.
Kristen half way there!
Barb kept me on the straight and narrow. Look how good the first square of her facecloth looks!
This is Jill's cloth; it's coming along great!
Judith caught on right away!
Pricilla is doing a great job!
Well, how did I think that I could teach an Elizabeth Zimmerman class? Truth is, many of the classes we have are more lead than taught. I did the project, redid it, practiced the techniques, and felt fairly confident I could guide the women who paid for the class. The pattern we are using for the washcloth is a very nice line by line guide. As classmate Judith pointed out, EZ says that slipping the first stitch is an important technique for having neat and nice edges. For the washcloth, you slip a stitch every row; once on the edge, and once on the turn back. I missed that. So after a few confusing moments, and wanting to crawl into a hole, we got on the right track and all was well. Thank heaven we weren't doing the real baby blanket or there may have been anarchy in the knitting store....Except for the invisible cast on, which we will review before we start the real blanket, everyone was well on their way to finishing their washcloth. I came home and had a nice, big glass of Fat Bastard Shiraz.
