In between work and the neverending packing, I am managing to knit a few rows here and there. My Togue Pond–Saco Stripes hybrid is coming along nicely, I think — to my great relief. It’s gone from testing my sanity to keeping me sane.
There was an evening in the big cabin at Squam, surrounded by professional knitters, where collective concern was expressed for the size of the thing. I had knitted five or six inches, and it did seem enormous. I kept counting my stitches and doing the math, and it seemed like it should be fine, except it didn’t look fine. So I put it away and moped, and nice people gave me yarn to try to keep me occupied. Squam was a major swatch-fest for me: Gudrun Johnston’s excellent short-rows class was a day-long series of tiny swatches, followed by Kate and Courtney’s highly recommended vest class which, of course, began with a swatch. So for my Friday free time between the two, the last thing I wanted to do was stop and swatch this sweater I was already knitting. (Not that there’s anything wrong with swatching! It’s wonderful and important and an awesome learning tool and all of that. But I’d had no time to knit for weeks, and here I was on a knitting break and I wanted to be knitting. On a dock.) In short: I was distressed.
Friday evening, after a mosquito-plagued but head-clearing walk, I sat down with the sweater in the dining hall — by then empty of all but me and Anna — and measured and counted again. I had come to the conclusion that swatching would do me no good in this case anyway. This is aran-weight linen, which is a rather mysterious creature. The finished sweater is going to drape and grow and change in ways that a swatch would not likely predict with any accuracy, no matter how many clotheslines I hung it from. So I decided to just have faith and keep knitting. And by Saturday afternoon I was knitting it on that dock, feet in the water, just as happy as a knitter could be.
I won’t know for certain until the shoulders are seamed together and I can put it on for real, but I think — I hope — it’s just right. So thank god I didn’t frog it in a panic and move on to something else.
If it works out, I promise to share my mods. In the meantime, I hope everyone has a fantastic weekend. To those of you who came to the sale last Saturday, it was marvelous to meet you and I apologize again for my appearance! I’d love to hear what you’re all working on —
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