All the news that's fit to blog

I just got home from the Thursday night knit together. There were only three of us this time. Renee is away for a few weeks so unless I can recruit a few more people it's going to be quite intimate for a while. Still had a good time even if I did mess up the row count on my poncho again. Only a few hundred stitches to rip in order to find out where I really am. I really should attach my row counter to my knitting. Maybe then I wouldn't forget to turn it.

The new student I wrote about last week, the one who kept forgetting what she was supposed to do next, came back in today. Ann Mary said she'd been in a couple of other times when I wasn't there. She's still having a few problems but has made a lot of progress. Today she learned that Lion Brand Homespun is not a good yarn for someone who's having her problems to knit with. I have to hand it to her though, she's determined and optimistic.

Very busy day again. I had four students working away on their projects. One is trying her hand at a felted bag. She's so funny. Everytime I show her something new she mutters. "Oh, God" or "damn" seem to be her favorite explitives. And she sort of rolls her eyes. The thing is though, she really gets it. She started with a lace pattern afghan but ripped it out after two skeins because she thought the color was too boring, not because she had problems with the stitches. Her first project, which she was doing in an adult ed class, was a garter stitch afghan. I asked her if she finished it and she said "Are you kidding? I gave that thing away, needles and all." I think she's going to be terrific in a very short time. Once she gets used to the prices of quality yarns and decent needles.

Then, late in the day, another new-to-me customer came in. "I'm desperate" she said. Another Christmas stocking disaster in the making. She had messed up the heel shaping. So we fixed that. She had been slipping the stitch for the PSSO but had been passing the stitch after the K1 over the stitch. So then we picked up the stitches for the gusset, using the color she said we were supposed to use. After about six rows of decreasing I discovered that she was using the wrong color. Ripped out the wrong color and started over. While she was doing that I was looking at the photograph of the stocking. "I have some bad news for you," I told her. "You're supposed to be using stockinette and you've used garter stitch."

"You mean it isn't knit every row? I thought it looked kind of funny." Well, it really does. She has a very short, squat snowman and the lettering is undecipherable. "I thought about using the imitation stitch but then I thought it looked okay." (She meant duplicate stitch.) "Well, I did the K2/P2 ribbing right." I don't know what she did but it looked a lot like garter stitch made up of alternating ribs of knit and purl. So she's going to do another stocking for a different relative and then decide if this one looks too bad in comparison. If it does she'll start over. You should have seen her intarsia. Very creative. She took the whole thing pretty well, considering. It's no wonder she didn't remember her last stockings, done 21 years ago, looking like this one. (I checked the pattern and there is no where that it specifically says to use st st.)

Yesterday was also pretty busy. The scarf traffic is picking up at last. A friend drove up from Long Beach to sit and knit for a while. Haven't seen him in several months so it was a good time. He's making his first sweater and is doing quite well. He brought me a copy of the Patons Forever Favorites pattern book that was given away at the Knit Out in Santa Monica last month. Very thoughtful. And there are a few things that I could easily add to my to do list.

And one more thing. This is weird, at least to me. I've noticed over the past few days that whenever I open a particular one of my daily reads I lose my internet connection. Is this possible or coincidental? It happened three days in a row, always with the same blog. So I have deleted it, at least temporarily. I did notice that there was a comment, "Done, but with errors on page". That's some kind of powerful error!