life with a chronic disease and a really big yarn stash
Author: Midnight Knitter
I weave, knit and read in Aurora, Colorado where my garden lives. I have 2 sons, a knitting daughter-in-law, a grandson and two exceptionally spoiled kittens. In 2014 I was diagnosed with a serious rare autoimmune disease called systemic sclerosis along with Sjogren's Disease and fibromyalgia.
I’m hanging out on the catio before it gets too hot.
Did you notice that yesterday was Caturday? I had to stay in the house all day long because the Mother of Cats drove off and left us all alone for the weekend. She has been a little crazy lately, that Mother of Cats… She decided at the last minute to do the Sharon on the Trail MKAL and dug around in her stash to find some yarns. Okay, it was like a yarn explosion, but that is fun, right?
Has she finished her Alpine Bloom sweater yet? No, she has not!!
Here ae the yarns she picked.
So she left us and went to her son’s house for the weekend because… he has new kittens!!! How could she leave us? Why did she ever think that she could knit while she was around KITTENS!!! She needs to come home right away!!
She did take out her yarns for a picture showing the order that she wants to knit them, but that is as far as she was able to get because…kittens!
So, the Mother of Cats hasn’t gotten any knitting done at all, which means that she is behind everyone else in the MKAL. Sharon from Security (Casapinka’s employee who needs a raise!) is in France hunting down Keith the Hiker who has (probably) stolen a mysterious paper wrapped object, stuffed it in his backback, and is currently on the trail with Sharon hot on his tail. The Mother of Cats needs to come home today so she can get some knitting down and we can get some COOKIES!!!
You know, I don’t think that the Mother of Cats can do much hiking, so I told Mateo that he is going to have to hit the trails with me if we’re going to help Sharon get that mysterious package back. France. We can do France.
I’m getting some rest so I’m ready to go!!
I hope that you all had a great Caturday, and that you weren’t abandoned and left all alone in a hot house with a crazy Mateo…
This is Hannah, signing off.
Notes from the Mother of Cats:
My son lost his beautiful cat Maya (who controlled the weather) and his remaining cat has been sad since then. Today Jonesy is looking happier than he has in months. Okay, maybe he’s still a little stressed, but that’s life with kittens for you…
The kittens are a Siamese mix and a classic tabby. So cute!
The yarns for the MKAL are from Indie dyers across the US: Texas, Colorado, Montana, and New York. How fun is that?
I was a biology teacher in the time of the Human Genome Project. This week, with the coming release of the newest movie about Oppenheimer and the development of the atomic bomb, I’ve been thinking about the DNA and genes again (I know, it is a biogeek thing…), because one of the candidates running for the Republican nomination in the US wants to cut the Department of Energy if elected.
Kind of a loose chain of threads, you’re probably thinking. Am I right? Well… the Department of Energy is the agency that is responsible for the regulation of the nuclear energy industry in the US. There’s a lot of waste coming out of those nuclear reactors, and there was some concern about how much mutational damage was being done to DNA through exposure to radiation. Well, to figure that out, you need to know what undamaged DNA looks like. The initial drive to figure out what the human genome looks like came from that agency and once the results came in early this century the world completely changed. Like a big change. Like an atomic bomb level change. Like, there are now sites that have huge depositories of biotechnical data and tools to aid in research.
Hannah’s World: no big changes here!
In the classroom we biology teachers began to teach about the Human Genome Project and also did a week-long unit around the ethical problems associated with this new knowledge (bioethics, if you will). The kids grappled with dilemmas like… if you had the gene for a fatal, untreatable illness, would you want to know? If you were a child at risk for this gene, would it be okay for your parents to have you tested for it before you are 18? If your unborn child tested positive for this condition, what would you do? Would it be okay for human organs to be grown for transplantation? Who should get the transplant… a single father of 4, or a 16-year-old student in your high school? Should your employer allow you to continue in your airline pilot job if a genetic test shows you are high risk for a sudden cardiac event. Should genetic test results be private? Whew. Lots to grapple with in this unit.
Makes your head hurt, doesn’t it. Check out my knitting progress this week!
So, shit kind of got real this week. One of the members of an online support group for pulmonary arterial hypertension (a progressive and fatal heart/lung condition that I have thanks to systemic sclerosis) has just been identified with a gene (bpmr2) that causes the condition; her PAH is caused by this gene and can be inherited; she has a different type from me, but it is still PAH. Oh, boy. This is not good at all. The life expectancy right now is up to about 7 years, but you only need one copy of the gene to be at risk for PAH… there is a 50% chance for each of her children that they inherited the gene. Only 20% of people with the gene will develop PAH, but that is still a big risk.
Should she tell her two children? she is asking in the forum. They are in their late 20s. If she does, and they get tested, should they have their own children if they have the gene? Her heart is broken, literally.
Life expectancy has greatly improved over the last few years with new medications being generated in the modern climate of expanding cellular and molecular biological information. Untreated PAH (and PH kind of gets lumped together with it according to my pulmonologist…) has a life expectancy of about 2.8 years… not good.
Rose break! By the end of the discussion thread, she was leaning towards telling the kids.
Which brings me to the next shitty bioethical item that occurred this week. One of the members of another support group caught Covid and had to go off her drugs while fighting the virus. She has been slow to recover, and still feels pretty bad, but she took a pregnancy test and restarted her medications again a few weeks ago, only to discover this week that she is actually 12 weeks pregnant. Why did she have to take a pregnancy test before restarting her drugs? Because some of the drugs used to treat PAH can cause extreme damage to a human fetus. The enrollment process is very strict, and every effort is made to keep patients from this situation.
I am in grief for this woman. The doctors think that the baby has been spared the worst of the drug toxicity, but now she is working her way through whether to abort or not, to restart her drugs, or not. To risk death to save the baby, or to abort and restart treatment. If the baby is born in good health, will she live long enough to see it enter kindergarten. If the baby is born with health problems, her medical burden is increased. She is young. This is a horrible mess, and she is already too far along to get an abortion in many states in the US. I don’t know if she has other children, or what her support structure is…
This week I heard that some states are demanding private health records to identify any out-of-state abortions or transgender care that has happened in another state. I hope that this woman lives in another country…
Then I heard that a popular hamburger joint near my home is now going to fire employees who wear a mask. Say, WHAT?! Let me tell you, any person who has a serious lung/heart condition like mine wants to wear a mask, and they are so grateful if the person at the service window is also wearing a mask. Sometimes people offer to put on a mask when they see that I am wearing one. Now that person can be fired for putting on a mask… remember the young PAH patient whose nightmare began with catching Covid? Truthfully, any random virus can cause serious damage to patients with PAH, especially if they are also immunosuppressed.
So, there are a lot of bioethical dilemmas here, and the unintended consequences of people who want to make sweeping decisions without understanding all the interlocking systems involved and the potential ramifications are staggering. NO, you can’t just disband the Department of Energy, and sweeping, inflexible decisions about reproductive issues (that seem to be smugly self-righteous to me) can be disastrous. It is easy to order up genetic tests, but what happens once you have the information can be life-altering.
And don’t get me started on this animosity towards mask wearing…
I can’t help but think that no one should attempt to enact legislation without suffering through experiencing something like the bioethics unit that was taught at the high school where I used to work. I keep wondering, do these legislators actually understand nuclear power and weapons? Have they heard of the Human Genome Project? About gene testing? About rare diseases? They absolutely need to go see the Oppenheimer movie, maybe, and then write me a report about the Human Genome Project. I’m pretty sure that they would struggle with epigenetics, but it would do them good if they looked into it. They can get extra credit for a summary of pulmonary arterial hypertension. I would like to give them a book list of summer reading to get through on their breaks, because only the well-informed and educated should attempt to make decisions about these issues in the seven levels of bioethical hell that is the life of patients like me.
Because this week was a really hard one; for too many people this shit is real.
PS: Have you seen the show House? I kind of think that he could use a little bioethics sensitivity training, too.
Bright sunny days are upon us, and the yard is filled with the call of blue jays. Okay, these guys are really noisy, and there are a lot more than usual this year, so the robins seem to be keeping a low profile. All of my plants are growing like crazy in the heat and the gardens are starting to look really good.
The cats are spending lots of time out on the catio.
I’ve discovered that the weeds are also growing like… weeds, so I have been spending an hour every day in the cool of the evening working in the gardens trying to keep ahead of the weed invasion.
There is a lot of pink going on in the garden right now. The Princess Alexandra of Kent rose is stilling going strong, the pink yarrow burst into bloom, and the snapdragons that are now blooming again are… just the pink ones! Of course, the angelica has joined in, and I must admit that the pink does make me feel good.
Even my knitting has pink blooms! This is the Alpine Bloom sweater by Caitlin Hunter.
So, I was thinking that maybe I should get some red when I took a trip to my local garden center this week. Woohoo! Roses WERE ON SALE at 30% off!!! It didn’t take long to locate a landscape shrub rose that had beautiful cabbage rose-ish blooms.
I thought that it would do well with the Ruby Meidiland roses along the back of my house.
The Rubies have been doing really well this year, but the shrubs didn’t fill in along the back of the house the way I thought they would, so there is room to put another rose between plantings.See, the new rose will fit right in there!
Now I have to do more weeding (duh!), get the new roses into the ground, and then I plan to put a nice organic mulch around everyone.
So now there are 38 roses!
Mateo: Don’t forget that tomorrow is Caturday!!
PS: Bea made this comment… “Mateo is wearing his don’t-mess-with-me face. He looks ready to rumble or hop on his Harley and hightail it for Sturgis.”
He kind of does, doesn’t he. I offer in his defense this picture of how he collapsed and fell asleep on the bookshelf last night…
The tough guy photo was taken right after I woke him up. It seems that he wakes up cranky…
So, I got a little testy in one of my Facebook support groups for systemic sclerosis this morning. A member of the group kind of disparaged me and another person for not being positive enough. It was “you need to refuse to let scleroderma define you” in response to the first person sadly saying that she missed her old life, and me giving her an online hug with the comment that if only a positive attitude was enough…
In my defense I had just experienced a Kaiser employee visibly reacting to my lack of wrinkles. As in, wow, that’s great! Like not having wrinkles makes this all worth it.
I lost another 4 pounds at my last check-in, which is concerning, but the nurse was thrilled for me. Me, I was a little teary at the continued loss.
Um, people… do you think that you might be a little shallow here?
I was out on the deck/catio with the cats drinking my morning latte when I hit this emotional wall, and after I had fired off the somewhat testy response, I spent some time in the garden. There were my roses, blooming like the utter champs that they are.
This is my Princess Alexandra of Kent rose.
This rose is looking great this year. Never before has the plant been able to hold up the blooms without the weight pulling the stems over. The problem is our semi-arid climate with hard winters; the plant grows back from the roots every year and it doesn’t have time to put in enough supportive tissue to hold up the blooms. This year, with all the rain and cool weather that we have had, the plant was able to put in enough of this tissue to do the job. The tissue that I’m talking about, a type of ground tissue, is called sclerenchyma. If you’re ever snapped a celery stalk in half and pulled out the strings, you were pulling out sclerenchyma tissue. This tissue is made of dry, hardened cells in the stem of the rose and I suspect that the “scler” part of the word is of the same origin as scleroderma. Look at that. The hardened cells are doing something good for this rose!
In me, not so much. Things have been a little difficult as my poor heart and lungs are not benefiting from the hardening and thickening going on in the cells and tissues of those organs. All of my tendons are seriously pissed off at the moment. Edema has become a problem, and it is becoming increasing clear that I need to stay on oxygen 24/7.
That’s my arm with the imprint of a quilt in it, in case you didn’t immediately recognize it… Edema is kind of a tip off that my heart is struggling and that’s new. The weight loss is also related to my heart/lungs because if oxygen isn’t getting down to my cells like it should, they can’t use energy efficiently, and then, you know, weight loss occurs. The tendon issue is scleroderma actively attacking them and gradually hardening them to bone. Bad scleroderma, bad!!
But look at how great these roses look!
So, what did I say in my testy response? Reality bites. Some of us have progressed to the point where we have to admit that no amount of positive thinking will allow us to attend that family function that we were invited to, or to visit the annual Wool Market in the mountains, or to even walk to the mailbox. To suggest that we could do things if we just had a more positive attitude is hurtful and not supportive. No matter how much you want to believe otherwise, scleroderma does define me and everyone else who is dealing with it. Courage requires us to face down the monster and to accept the reality of our disease. How we choose to function within that framework is up to us.
I may no longer be as mobile as I once was, and the life that I used to have is now mostly gone, but I choose to continue to bloom in place.
Like a rose.
Updates/Notes from the ScleroFront:
Do you like to wear linen? Those fibers are from the water tubes (xylem) in the flax plant, and made of sclerenchyma.
The bunny-murdering neighbor put her house up for sale!!
Yesterday was the Independence Day here in the USA. Fireworks are traditional; my neighborhood goes kind of overboard with the celebrating in that regard. Poor Hannah cowered under the bed and Mateo vanished for the three hours that skyrockets boomed directly overhead and showers of sparks glittered in the night. I finished up all the knitting on the Soldatna Crop, closed the gaps under the sleeves, and then wove in all of the ends. Towards midnight there was a huge thunderstorm that outboomed even the loudest of the skyrockets and I gently misted the sweater and steam blocked it into its final shape.
It is done!!
The Hannah savaged spot is just barely visible, but I am over it.
Do you see it now? The biggest damage is that some of the color has been removed in the fibers that were pulled off in the aggressive grooming Hannah incident. If I move fast, no one will ever notice it and I want to get on with the next knitting project because a new pattern appeared that I want to start right now!! It’s another little sweater by the same designer, Caitlin Hunter, called Alpine Bloom. I downloaded the image of the sweater so you can understand my urgent need: isn’t that the cutest ever? (sweater image is copyright of Caitlin Hunter)
I’m planning right now on doing the colorwork in the hot pink and I may slip in some flower details with the purple. I’ve been looking at other projects online and I actually like the ones that only use one color the best, so I may just stick with the hot pink. Check out the lace at the neckline and the sleeves: cute, cute, cute!! I need to get my needles switched over to this new project right this second, so the Soldotna is now declared done.
In other new, I actually saw a BUNNY in the front yard this week! It is an adult, and it came from across the street to hang out by my tree, but it made me really happy to see it. Stay away from the back yard, little guy!
Finally, how about an update on the roses? They are continuing to flourish and the new blooms are appearing daily. I did a count this week, and I actually have 34 plants right now. Obviously, I need to get another few to take it up to 40, right?
I do have room in the garden because not a single one of the really cute lavender plants that I put out last year came back. A couple of the well established English ones made it, but that was all. I did a little sleuthing on the internet to try to figure out what happened and quickly discovered that the Spanish lavender that I thought was so cute didn’t have a chance.
Yeah, if this plant struggles with temperatures below 10 degrees F, then the -24 degrees F that happened last year absolutely was too cold for it. Actually, it was a problem for most of the garden as I lost the part of the rose plants that were above the ground, but thankfully they all grew back from the roots okay in the spring and it really did help that we had a lot of rain.
It has been kind of a tough week. The weather shifted and suddenly became hot; I struggled with the sudden heat and couldn’t sleep well. I had adventures with online ordering that created a duplicate of an expensive item that finally got returned for me by my son. Mateo caught a baby bunny somehow that he brought into the house; it took two hours to catch it. My ankles/feet have decided that they hate my guts with as much swelling and tendon pain as my wrists did last month. Then the absolute worst: my next-door neighbor poisoned the bunnies and every single baby bunny died along with most of the adults that I have seen. I suddenly understood why bunnies suddenly disappeared last year.
I put the bodies into her trash. Every single one of them, including the rescued baby that I had carefully returned to the yard two days earlier.
Okay, enough of that. You should see what has been happening with the Soldotna Crop sweater:
Look at how cute it is now!!
I’ve been taking the knitting off the needles and steam blocking it to check for length, and I’m so pleased with how the sweater fits and looks now. I finished the ribbing late last night, steam blocked the whole body this morning, and took it out for this picture. Looking good, huh!!
I put the sweater onto blocking mats to finish drying indoors, and then I headed out to take some pictures of the roses. Let me tell you, these roses are really happy with the water earlier this year, and now that it is hot, they are blooming like crazy!
These are the front roses, and they are really looking good this year! Do you see all of those buds? They have never been this lush and prolific before. These roses are called Hot Cocoa.
My Princess Alexandra of Kent roses are enormous!
That rose is over 4 inches across, and for once the plant is sturdy enough to hold all of the blooms upright.
These roses are the little ones that you buy in the grocery store. I planted them outside and they really are blooming their little hearts out now!Do you see what is going on with this plant? I had to put supportive rings around it like you do with peonies because of the weight, and the buds haven’t even opened yet!!
So, the roses are looking pretty darn good. I went back into the house with the pictures and discovered that Hannah had savaged overly-loved the Soldotna while I was out of the house.
She has done this to other items. I think that she is grooming the sweater, but I was not happy…
I pulled the worst of the fluff to the inside of the sweater with a little crochet hook, and then I shaved the remaining fluff off. It isn’t perfect, but it isn’t horrible. I’ve decided to finish the sleeves and will then decide if I should rip back to above the damage and then reknit the bottom of the sweater. I don’t want to reuse the blocked yarn, and it all depends on how much of the dusty pink is left over. I’m pretty sure that I will rip and then reknit. This sweater must be cursed…
Hannah: I couldn’t help myself. I love the sweater soooo much… besides, it was WET WOOL!!!
This has been quite the year so far. I have never seen so much spring rain; it has been cool with daily rain for weeks (along with a few scary thunderstorms that triggered hail and tornado sirens…). After years of drought, this has been a little disconcerting this year.
Do you see the little yellow star on the rainfall map? Yeah, that’s me. There has been so much water I have had to rescue potted plants that were overflowing (with the poor plants drowning inside the flooded pot) and the plants and trees are more lush than I’ve ever seen before. I had a little pond in the back yard, and I never took the winterization covers off the outdoor faucets until today. Finally, finally this week the weather turned, and it became warm outdoors over the weekend. I finally turned off the furnace for the summer last night.
Hannah: where are the moths?
Poor Hannah, the miller moths are now gone, but the butterflies are right around the corner. Maybe there will be dragonflies! Summer is finally here. I headed out to the yard to get some pictures.
My first rose has opened up!!The columbine is blooming! There are even more mushrooms appearing under my Douglas fir.Things are looking pretty good at my front door. Okay, the deer are starting to look a little worn (bark has been falling off…), but that pinyon pine is covered in new growth!
The older bunnies of the spring are now laughing at me from the (unusually lush) lawn, and there is a new fluffle of babies emerging from under the deck.
There are birds everywhere in the yard, but I had no luck snapping a shot. I did, however, capture a bee at the catmint.
I have to admit, I’ve been way too emotionally involved in this little sweater, the Soldotna Crop by Caitlin Hunter. I shopped and shopped the stash for some yarn. I dithered about whether to knit this little charmer in the DK weight that the pattern was written for, or to go rogue and to try it out in fingering weight. Needle size became an issue. I decided to go up a pattern size, because… fingering… even though my gauge was close. Then there were the colors… I was pretty torn about how to handle the four colors as they are displayed in the final sweater. I wanted a speckled or variegated yarn to break up the pattern a little, but that creates its own issues… Finally, finally I arrived at a final decision and got through more than half of the colorwork chart. Here’s the post about all the false starts, tinking and whatnot that went on…
This is the final color order (left to right) that I settled on for my Soldotna Crop.
I’m happy to report that things are now working out! I knitted steadily last week and got past the split between the arms and the body of the sweater last Friday. By late afternoon yesterday I was a couple of inches below the split and becoming a little concerned about how this baby would fit. I took the work off the needles, did some fast steam blocking, and then tried it on for fit.
Houston, we have a sweater!!!
This is a huge, huge relief! I took it outside for some fast pics and this afternoon I’m putting it back onto the needles and will continue on. Yay!
Full view: I’m really liking how the colors are showing in the body; that’s why I wanted to use a variegated yarn so that there would be subtle differences.Here’s a close-up of the fabric.
I’m really happy with how things are going now. This sweater sure had a rough start, but I’m rocking along now.
Like just about every other kid in American, I have spent some time on the basketball court. I’m a wicked guard, not a great shot, and let’s not talk about my free throw statistics. There’s a lot of running around involved; I’m not a fan of running. Basketball never took for me, and as I got older, I was more drawn to softball, gymnastics, and volleyball. Basketball… meh. I don’t follow it, never watch it, and yeah… not really a fan.
But this year basketball has been all around me.
Last winter, fighting a flare, pumping myself up for a trip to the cath lab to check the pressures in the right side of my heart, I started reading The Light We Carry by Michelle Obama. Michelle really made an impact on me; she knits, she understands chronic illness, and she struggled with her height as a kid growing up in Chicago. The tallest girl by far in her class, she was always singled out, at the back in pictures, the anchor when kids lined up, you know… different. There was so much in her book to identify with; I suspect we all have something that made us apart and different as a child, and we all know how hard the middle school years are. She found her way, as we all know, and shines with self-confidence and purpose these days. The book was great, I learned a lot, and I recommend it.
Michelle is 5’11” tall, much taller than me!
Michelle wrote about her older brother Craig in the book, who also attended Princeton University, and out of curiosity I googled him. Oh. Craig Robinson has his own Wikipedia page. He’s a force in the world of basketball and is currently the Executive Director of the National Association of Basketball Coaches. Suddenly the height in the family made sense, and I remembered that President Obama also played basketball. Kind of interesting, huh. Basketball.
I loved Dear Edward, so I bought this book as soon as it came out.
Then I started my next audiobook, Hello Beautiful, while knitting along on the Hannah blanket. This is a book that will stick with you a long time, and I’ve really been unpacking the layers as I think about it even now. Imagine a dysfunctional family that loses a child just as a new baby comes home. Somehow the grief and loss from the death of their little girl is projected onto the little boy (William) growing up, and he is alone, unwanted, at a loss, searching for a family, and quite tall for his age. He finds a family and sense of purpose in basketball. He marries into a family with 4 girls, and just when you think all will be well, the bottom falls out. He is unable to play basketball any longer because of an injury, but he is lost without it. He tried to be the man his wife wants and goes to graduate school where he begins a thesis on the History of Basketball, but he also struggles to understand who he is and what should his life be. There are births, deaths, loss, grief, abandonment, and yearning for family throughout the book… and basketball. William ends up working for the Chicago Bulls basketball organization. Another great book, I learned a lot, and I recommend it.
By the start of this week I was knitting again without my wrist braces (yay!) and I watched a couple of movies online while I stitched along. I’d heard about this new movie called Air that is the story of the development of Nike’s Air Jordan shoes, so I watched that Sunday night while stitching on the Soldotna Crop sweater.
Look at all the progress that I’ve made! I’m coming up on the point where I separate the arms from the body of the sweater.
I thought that this would be a movie about a scrappy little company creating a new shoe. Oh, it is that, but it is soooo much more. It is a story about purpose, finding your way, and basketball. It is about maintaining balance, recognizing your worth, demanding the best, and knowing that a shoe is just a shoe until a person who will be a force for change and a model of excellence, Michael Jordan, puts their foot into it. It is about risking it all in order to make a change. What a good movie! I seriously wanted to have a pair of Air Jordans for myself by the end of the movie, and it was even better because the basketball team involved is the Chicago Bulls in Chicago. William from Hello Beautiful‘s team!
There’s kind of a pattern here, huh? A president and first lady from Chicago. William finding himself again in Chicago at the Chicago Bulls. Nike putting all their marbles into one basket with a new shoe on the foot of a player that they think will be the future of basketball, a player for the Chicago Bulls. Synchronicity. Obviously, I need to watch some basketball…
While I was totally not paying attention, the Denver Nuggets, the NBA team in my area, advanced in the championship series. As it turns out, the game that could win them the championship was last Monday.
So, knitting like crazy, I watched my first basketball game in a couple of decades last Monday. The Denver Nuggets won! The first championship for the franchise ever. Fireworks were going off behind my house as I finished the last round of knitting before separating the arms from the body of the sweater; you know this sweater… it had been ripped and tinked for weeks as I struggled with it. Today I’m knitting away on the body, my wrists are pain free, and I seem to have popped out of the flare.
The weather has been just crazy here. In the mornings the air is cool, the sky is bright blue, bees rule in the garden, and birdsong echoes through the backyard. The cats and I head outside to the catio where I enjoy my current book and morning latte while the cats chase the occasional miller moth and stalk bunnies from their side of the wire. When my latte is finished, I get a little gardening done while the flowerbeds are in the shade and the cats doze on the deck.
See how cool it is out in the yard? That huge mushroom just appeared under one of my trees. Several plantings are now starting to bloom, and the roses are covered with buds. Mornings outdoors are really cool!! By noon clouds are gathering, gloom begins to gather in the house, and ominous rumbles start to sound to the west. The afternoon thunderstorms are piling up and moving east; sometime soon there will be rain, lightening, thunder, hail and hopefully no tornado alert…
This week’s hailstorm… seriously, the weather has been something this year. I don’t know when I’ve seen so much rain before.
Trapped indoors, I spend the gloomy afternoons tinking back on my current knitting project, the Soldotna Crop.
What is going on? Well, there have been an endless run of knitting misadventures with the sweater. First of all, I started knitting this sweater while wearing braces on both wrists. Yeah. The tension was a little funky. I frogged the sweater after a couple of days and started over. I transitioned to compression wrist braces and managed to get a couple of inches into the sweater. Um… the short row turns left holes in the fabric of the sweater, so I frogged back and reknitted that evening using German short rows. Great. I finally got to the colors and started knitting the chart.
I started knitting using this order of yarns, starting with the dusty orchid and moving right.
Yeah. I didn’t like the way the third color, the turquoise multi, looked. I wanted the gold next to the dark plum. I tinked back and dug around in the yarn stash.
I decided to knit the color chart in these colors, the alternative selection.
I really liked the gold yarn in the #3 slot, but the light silver was too light, literally. The weight of the yarn made it seem flimsy in the knitting, so… I tinked it back out. Back to the stash.
That darker grey is a heavier yarn that played well with the others. Yay! I made a lot of progress, but after taking the knitting outside I decided that the new grey was a bad decision. I knitted a swatch with the original turquoise multi and laid it on the sweater.Doesn’t this look a lot happier?
There was more tinking. I don’t want to talk about it. Two days ago, I knit back with the newest color order and this what I got.
I like it!
I think that I’m done tinking for now; the plan is to just keep knitting and let the color chips fall where they may. My hands are feeling so much better that I can knit pain-free again, but I am still wearing the compression wrist braces for now. I’m almost halfway through the color chart and my gauge is spot on. I’m feeling pretty good about the knitting and there is only one last concern hanging over me… I sure hope that this thing fits!!
Have you wondered how the Scrunch socks that I started while struggling with tendonitis are doing?
I’m hoping to get the socks done over the weekend. 🙂
So, that was the week. Beautiful mornings, lots of rain, and adventures in knitting every afternoon and evening.
Yarn, Books & Roses 