Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Goodbye August


August has been a blur—transitioning from lab work to home modification work, and then back to school has disrupted the normal routine.  This has not, however, had a significant impact on the amount of knitting getting done around here.

August began with a great deal of activity in the dye “studio”, that area of the basement where the floor is colorful and jars of dye grow fuzzy things.  It got some serious use for a few weeks, as this picture demonstrates.  A good fiber buddy came over for an afternoon to observe and sample the activity (see her coverage of the event here). 

Once the dye studio was taken over by the home modification effort, my attention was shifted to teaching a colleague how to knit.  I even had the chance to meet her at the yarn store and show her some of the possibilities for her first project. 

She is off to a great start:


The process of learning how to knit has been going well for her, though there has been more than one session of “forensic knitting” in which I have closely observed her technique to discern how her scarf was developing holes and wings.  Initially, she was not completing every stitch, resulting in a slipped stitch and a yarnover, which turned into an eyelet on the next row.  We cured her of that habit, but then she developed a new symptom of knitting in the garter stitch row below, creating 2 stitches that should have been one.  We seem to have worked that one out, too.  It’s been a few days since I have heard about the scarf (Irene might have increased time to knit, but she has not fostered electronic forms of communication), but hopefully some good progress has been made.