Silver and Soot

I wasn't going to do it, but the unfinished pieces kept floating up out of every dark hold where I'd stowed them. They wouldn't do me the courtesy of staying down so that I could forget about them. Here, then, is the finished Julia tank from Hot Knits.


I don't have too many details about it, because I kept trying to forget everything about making it. I think I used size 11 needles, and I think I made the small. I know it all came out wrong. The armholes were too deep, and the body was too short.


I picked up and knit three out of four stitches around the armholes and bound off on the next row. Rather than making the turtleneck, I went with a little rolled neck.

I don't even know how much yarn I used, because when I abandoned it a few months ago, I took a couple of skeins of what was left and used it to make that crocheted top. On the bright side, I did get that yarn out of my stash, so that's cool. That's the main reason I picked it back up and finished it. I kept shoving the unfinished pieces into the stash bin, so it still felt like it was part of the stash to me. It's graduated to garment status now, even if I only wear it once before giving it away. I feel good about that.


If I'd been happier with any part of it, I would have kept better notes. As it stands, I don't have enough to say about it to warrant the usual finished object details rundown. Besides which, I don't want anyone else to be so influenced by the details section that they try to make one. Save yourselves. It's too late for me.

"...yarrr...cough...cough..."

Pirate Skull Planter? Is that you?


"Aye, lass, though I fear I'm not long for these waters."

Was it the sweater? Was it that I didn't make a flag out of the yarn instead of trying to fashion it into a garment? You know I'd do it differently if I had it to do over, right?

"Ye've done nothin' wrong, lass. 'Tis a nice little top. Perhaps you'd be good enough to wear it to see me off to Davey Jones' locker."

What the Hell are you talking about?

"Have ye not noticed? I be dyin'. Shufflin' off the coil. Look at my head!"

But that's just the plants, Pirate Skull Planter. They've been flagging since we moved down here last year.


"What makes me what I am if I'm a Planter what can't keep plants? I'm steerin' toward a Charybdis of existential crisis. I am broken in spirit, lass! Can the rest of me be more than a day's sail behind?"

Oh, for God's sake. I'll buy you some new plants and hot-glue them to your head, O.K.? You'll be good as new. I'll put it on the list of things to do to kill time during the workday. I'll put it above "knit", "look up useless facts on the internet", "see how long it takes to walk around the building", and "chew gum". I think all of those things should come in second to "make Pirate Skull Planter feel jaunty". Which should itself come in second to "do actual work for which I'm paid", but never mind that now. Cool?

"Aye!"

I do have some better projects in the works, now that my Summer of Ribbon Knitting is officially over. I don't want to go out to the car to get it, though. Pirate Skull Planter seems kind of fragile right now.

Purpley

Remember this thing? I'm finishing it by Wednesday, my birthday. I'm finishing it, and then I'm not knitting anything with ribbon for the rest of the summer. I'm already a few rows into the back above the spit for the arms, so I think it's possible.

"Purpley!" said Daisy. "Hey, did you ever finish that grey top?"

"What grey top?"

"The one with the ribbon yarn."

"Yeah. I wore it last week. You saw it."

"No, not the one with the big stripes. The GREY one."

"We mustn't speak of it, lest we permanently damage our friendship. Change the subject. Change the subject now."

"Look! Over there! It's my puppy!"


"Good show, Daisy. No anger can stand when faced with the cuteness of the puppy."

"The Woman!"

"Except for Buddy's anger, of course."

"Of course."


"Stop bringing these beasts into our home, the Woman!"

"She's not going to live here, Buddy. She's just visiting."

"Oh, well then. The rationalizing makes it acceptable, does it? What if we say that I'm not going to permanently disfigure her, that I'm just going to lightly maul her. Does that make everyone happy?"


"Daisy, you might want to grab your puppy."

It'll only be a couple of weeks until she's too big for him to fight, but that doesn't mean he won't try. That's my Buddy. Territorial, pugnacious, and no ability to assess risk.

le purr

That's Beru, Daisy and Falstaff's cat. She loves to climb into my lap, stretch out along my thigh and attack my knees through my jeans. She only does it to me, and she only does it when I'm wearing jeans. I bottle fed her when she was a tiny kitten, and I used to let her curl up and sleep in the hollow of my collar bone while I watched television. I think maybe she formed some strange bond with me as a result. Content yourselves with looking at her, because you're not going to see any finished knitting or crochet today.

The Tagliatelle sleeveless whatever? I hate it. I hate it so much that I've contemplated taking it outside and putting it on the barbecue to burn. The only thing preventing me from doing this is that it's acrylic, and I fear it would ruin my barbecue by melting all over it. Looking back to the post where I talked about buying it, I see that I paid $28 for eight skeins, so if I decided to throw it out, I'd only be throwing away $17.50, because I still have almost three unused skeins.

What went wrong, you ask? Somehow, although I measured carefully, even taking it off the needles onto waste yarn at one point, it ended up several inches too short and too wide. It makes me look shorter and wider than I am as a result and, after almost a month of not going to the gym and drinking white mochas to get me through the workday, I don't need any help there. No, it won't block out to the right length again. That's a fool's errand, trying to make that work.

And no, I can't take it apart and reuse the yarn, because the act of seaming it together was such an exercise in splitting and clinging that there are knots in the seams that cannot be undone. I'm not even sure how some of them ended up there. The seams look like total crap, so there's not going to be any forging ahead with them as they are. It's not like this is my first seaming job, but it sure as Hell looks like it.

I'm sure that at some point this week I'll be able to pick it back up and get most of it apart again, a few knotted sections not withstanding, and maybe I'll make a lovely shawl or something out of it. Yeah, it's a small sum of money tied up in it, but it's a stash project, and it feels wrong somehow to reduce my yarn hoard by throwing it in the trash. For now, let us not speak of it again.

The Working Hour

"I be mighty amused, miss! Why would'ye be wearing that fetchin' rag on yer head, then?"

"Oh, hey, Pirate Skull Planter. I'm feeling kind of glum, actually. My vacation wasn't long enough, and I'm losing my big, roomy cubicle, and I'm just generally out of sorts. By the way, the 'fetching rag' on my head is the back of my fisherman's rib tank. Thanks for the kind words of encouragement."

"And here I be thinkin' it your new jack. Lustrous and shimmery, like a piece of silver half buried in a keg of powder."

"Yeah, thanks, it is kind of...wait, what? I can't tell if that was a compliment. Oh, whatever. I just wish it were done. I've lost all desire to knit it, but I don't want to start anything else until it's complete. I don't have all that much in the way of summer clothes, so I have to knit faster if I hope to still be appropriately covered come July. I could end up wearing the Fluffy Angora Menace on a 100-degree day with the way things are going now. It almost happened today.

And I'm not kidding about the move. We'll be up in a hovel on the fifth floor by the end of the month. We're losing thirty square feet, including the rainforest corner I've set up over there. I don't know what I'm going to do with my trees."

"Ha! Fine bit of hilarity there, lass. Ye're pullin' my non-existent leg."


"If only I were, Pirate Skull Planter. If only I were. It's a third smaller, and the group that sat there before us were animals. They unscrewed half of the overhead lightbulbs because they wanted to work in the dark, and I think there might actually be graffiti on the cube walls. It's scrubby.

Ah, maybe it won't be so bad. If I had to pick any cubicle in the building other than my own, I'd pick that one. It's in a sunny corner, set back from the main aisle. The plants that I manage to fit in the space will be happier, and I've always wanted to sit near a window. You'll like it up there."

"Aye. One berth be pretty much like another for Pirate Skull Planter."

"That's the spirit! And I'll finish this sweater and it'll be stunning and appropriate for even the hottest summer day, and then I'll start in on something more exciting."

"Easy there, me little bowspirit. Ye don't want to engage in too much optimism all at once."

"I am still feeling a little grouchy about my vacation. F&%king short, expensive vacation, and now I'm not going to feel right about going on another one this year because we screwed up the budget with this one, and...hey, thanks, Pirate Skull Planter! I now feel perfectly balanced between cheery optimism and the kind of frustration that makes me want to punch people in the throat."

"Yar! Glad I could keep you on an even keel."

"Arr!"

"Oh, hey there, Pirate Skull Planter. What's up?"

"I feel that my charms have been sorely underrepresented in these waters, and I'm lookin' to remedy the situation, if you take my meaning."

"Pirate Skull Planter! Don't I frequently feature you in WIP and swatch pictures? Haven't you been mentioned independent of knitting in this blog at least twice?"

"Not good enough! I've bad news for you, lassie. I'll be takin' over your enterprise."

"Pretty tall order, considering you don't have hands. Or a body. And that you're made of resin. And that you have air plants hot-glued to your head, which require me to dunk you upside-down in a mug of tepid water twice a month. You don't exactly call the shots."

"Yar...I be powerless in the face of your mobility."

"Be happy with your lot in life, Pirate Skull Planter. Let's show off the swatch now, O.K.?"

"Ay. Fer now. Ye've not heard the last of me."


Fisherman's rib ho! Big needles, few stitches, wearable in summer, from the stash. I've got a good feeling about this one.