WOMN 8/14

Sorry for the hiatus; this heat slows everything down.

I was working happily along on Summer in Kansas, which seemed kind of appropriate to the weather, and making some progress:

--when I began to worry a bit about the recent section, the beginning of the larger pattern:

Does the upper part look a little stretched to you? I mean, I know it's stretched; I've pinned it out to 18 sts per 4", the gauge given in the pattern, and the gauge my blocked swatch measured. But I swatched the smaller pattern, not the larger, and now I'm wondering. I know it will bloom a little and relax a little after blocking, but is that upper area looking uncomfortable? Should I rip back the 10 rows to the transition, and work the next section of the shawl on a larger needle?

What happens when we reach these forks in the pathway of our knitting? Say it with me, knitters: put the project down. I don't want to let this become an official dormant UFO, but I can't bear to keep working on it when there's a distinct possibility that I'll rip out everything I do.

So . . . remember this old thing?

You may have seen it looking not much smaller in the What's On Our Needles section of the website. It's been on needles for, at a guess, over two years. It tends to see daylight (and progress) about this time of year, because I get it into my head that I could finish it in time to wear it for Rosh Hashanah.

It's getting a little unwieldy. The row is over 600 stitches long now. You can see

that there are several needles in it--five, I think--because the middle section got too wide for a 24" circular, and I didn't have another longer one, and I couldn't face buying another 3.25 mm circular when, as you can see, there were already quite a few lying around the house.

I should be in the home stretch. I know I've started the seed stitch blocks in the four corners, and planned out the final color sequence. But my project notes are, um, well . . . here, look:

The two columns of numbers on the left are Koigu dye codes, I know, representing two possible endgame color series. I must have opted for the one on the right, because one of the two balls attached to the work is #623 (the ball band is wound into the ball in anticipation of just such occasions). But how many rows am I working with each skein? How many to transition between skeins? The tally on the right is fairly clear about how far one skein will go--though I have no idea what the numbers 8, 6, and 3 1/2 represent.

The important stuff is at the bottom of the right column:

That's where I'm trying to tell myself how many rows it is from this point (what point? The point where I made the notes, of course) to the end, and how they're distributed. I think they were actually just a counting device so the seed stitch blocks would start at the right point.

You'd think by now I'd know my own knitting habits well enough to keep better records, wouldn't you? I mean, by the time I made these notes, the project had been on needles for more than a year and had gone dormant at least twice. Apparently some part of my brain thinks the rest of me likes a challenge.