I Came Close!

Here's what I accomplished on Pi in the week between early last Sunday evening when I cast on and 2 hours before party time - about 2:00 p.m. yesterday when....

...I ran out of yarn. I knew it would be close. I knew Saturday in the sweltering heat at Soccer Field Day...

...as I knit kind of side saddle with the work on top of the cooler beside me rather than on my lap, I wouldn't be ready in time to block it. I hoped I could finish the knitting though.

I worked on it until about 1:00 am Sunday (by that point I had made it counterclockwise around to the single green marker) then got up early and put another few hours on it Sunday morning, set it aside to prepare my contributions for the birthday dinner and get dressed and then set to it again. In that final hour my heart was actually beating a bit faster as I flew along on the garter stitched edging wondering whether the time or the yarn would be the first to run out. If I'd had enough yarn I would have made it!

In the end I printed off a copy of the almost finished shawl picture at the top of this post and tucked it onto the birthday card. Mom was very pleased. With the high humidity yesterday it felt like about 40 degrees celcius as we gathered pool side at my sister's place. Unlike a week or two ago I don't think she lamented the absence of a warm and woolly shawl to throw around her shoulders (she was the only one not to bring her suit and go swimming - she definitely did regret that - the water was beautifully cool and refreshing!)

She does have one more ball of that yarn left with which she needs to crochet the neck band onto her sweater and then I can have the rest. I'm sure there will be enough to do both jobs but my mother is a plodding perfectionist so I'll have to wait. I'll put the few stitches left on Pi without an edge onto a holder and chase her down about getting the sweater done in September so I can have the remainders.

The Pi shawl is an EZ "unvention" that is much like an algebraic "formula". The knitter is free to plug in the variables of her choice (size, yarn, gauge, pattern) and see what the "solution" looks like in the end with the finished FO .(I'm suspecting that most of her "patterns" are similar in this respect but I'll have to dig deeper into her writings to see if that's true for sure).

While the knitting is essentially complete for this Pi, the variable of blocking still remains. It should open up significantly with a hard blocking, changing the feel and drape of the fabric to an as yet to be determined degree that I'll look forward to discovering in the fall.

Thanks for dropping by!