Keeping on…

I’ve had very little internet access over the last couple of weeks. I didn’t really plan to disappear. Nothing serious, just life as it happens.

I finished my game of tatting chicken. Frankendoily Lives! I scrounged every last piece of thread I could find and untatted two errors I had cut away from other pieces (sometimes it pays to be a hoarder…) I made more joins in the last section than I normally do for a whole item. I plan to do a post on my tatting blog about that one. There are some tricks to using up every last scrap of thread. I haven’t cut away the ends or blocked it yet. The final join still needs to be made (lower right corner).

Beatrice
Iris Niebach

Postscript – after I had finished the damn thing, I found another long piece of thread – enough to have seen me comfortably finished. Guess where? I had used it as a lifeline in the Jinxed Jersey.

The aforementioned Jinxed Jersey is almost finished! I test-sewed it together and it actually looks as if it is going to fit. Fingers and toes crossed. I still have the last sleeve to do – in case anyone was wondering if this is a new fashion statement – and the neck rib.

Jinxed to the end

I was knitting along happily on the sleeve, finished the rib, changed needles and carried on, not like the time I forgot to change needles at all. It was about twenty rows further when I realized I had only changed one needle…

Top of the sleeve, strange things happened with the decreases. I had 8 stitches more than I should have. I went over my calculations a dozen times and couldn’t find the problem.

I write down each row number as I knit – it is the only way that I can keep track, particularly since I work out my own patterns. It took me a couple of days to realize what I had done. My calculations were fine. I had counted my rows 167, 168, 169, 178…

I promised my husband this jersey last winter. Fingers crossed he gets it for this one.

He is going along reasonably well. We will be seeing the specialist on the 16th. He’s never been a fan of taking lots of medication, and has always been the healthiest of the three of us. He was looking at all his tablets the other day and said ‘If I got better, how would they know?’ He’s got a point. Look at the side effects of most of them and it’s pretty much what’s going on with him.

There’s an Afrikaans phrase that was a favourite of my mother’s.  ‘Aanhou, Uithou en Bekhou’. Roughly, Keep on, keep going and keep quiet. It works better in Afrikaans. ‘Bekhou’ is literally ‘shut your mouth’, but it is the word used for an animal’s mouth, not a human. Not really polite. But sometimes it’s all you can do.