The Sky Is Grey

So blocking bowls...

really are the place where my knits go to die.

I took this picture at 10 o'clock this morning.

If you're keeping track I put the knits in water on Tuesday.

Three days ago.

And here they are still in the same bowls of water.

The shame was too much to bear.

Humiliated...I laid them out to block.

I had also pulled an item from The Abyss and soaked it for blocking.  I proudly laid it out to block, full of satisfaction that I was completing something long forgotten.  I was accomplishing something.  I was being productive and the world was full of joy!  Plus it had only been in the water overnight, so there was that.

Obviously my joy did not last long.

Do you see what I see?

That right there my friends is a HOLE!  A flipping freaking hole.  And not an on purpose-decorative-artistically place hole.  But a flipping bug ate my yarn hole!

Cue the ugly cry and descending black depression.

That hole is the thief of joy.  It is the death of all good things.  It is the worst thing to happen to anyone anywhere in the history of ever!

I wish I could tell you that I came up with a brilliant fix for that hole.

I could have, theoretically, taken some left over yarn from this project and duplicate knit fixed the hole.  Only the yarn I used was an amazing gradient yarn.

This poses two problems.   1) the yarn end wouldn't match the middle of the skein hole.  2)  I knit until I ran out of yarn, so there is no left over yarn in.  Practically speaking, this fix won't work.

I wish I could tell you that I personally sheared the softest sheep I could find.  And then I carded and hand spun the roving into the perfect thickness of yarn to match the original yarn used in the shawl.  Then I hand dyed the hand spun yarn from a dye I created from crushed beetle shells to find the perfect shade of almost grey, again, to match the original yarn from the shawl.  Then I took my perfectly dyed to match yarn, and I duplicate stitch fixed the hole.

But I didn't do that either.

In the end there were two lines of knitting that were broken.  I used a teeny tiny crochet hook to help me take the two ends, and I tied them into a knot.  They were too short to take across the hole and tie to close the hole, so I tied a knot on either side of the hole.

I tied knots and I prayed that my teeny tiny knots will hold.

Because the only other fix I could think of was to unravel the shawl back to the hole and to then splice the yarn together so I could reknit the rest of the shawl resulting in an identical shawl, minus one hole.

And I'm just not in the mood to do that.

I like it holes and all!

Pattern:  Pebble Beach Shawl

Yarn:  Some fabulous hand dyed gradient yarn my Dad and StepMommy bought me last summer.

Needles:  Maybe size 6 like the pattern suggest?

Modifications:  Not really a pattern modification, but I knit until I ran out of yarn.  And then I used some black KnitPicks sock yarn to finish the shawl.  I think it blended well with the grey gradient.

Review:  Again...

I loves it.  Hole and all.

Triangle

Failed attempt at a triangle.

I bought the pattern in August of last year, and I'm betting I knit it in August of last year.  I think it was a super quick knit and I enjoyed knitting it.  But beyond a fuzzy feeling of love I'm not remembering anything more specific.

Bad blogger.

I'm anticipating a lot of that as I finish things from The Abyss.  A general feeling of love (because I love knitting) but a complete lack of specific details.

I'll have to work on my abysmal photography skills to keep things interesting around here.

If I'm keeping score is this Abyss - 1 Me - 0?

Because of the deep dark depression inducing hole?

I'm going to say no.

This is Me - 1 Attempted sabotage by The Abyss - 0

And in red sweater news

I have two sleeves.  Achievement Unlocked!

My cat is unaccustomed to my strange knitting/blogging/photography ways.

She is judging me.

She will learn.