A Pause For Healing and Minor Knitting

I’ve been quiet for a little while because I’ve had another procedure on my ankle, minimally invasive this time but still annoying not to be allowed to walk for the past month. Surprisingly I have not felt like knitting at all.

I have been working on my Vajiante or “Vag” shawl and have made it to two of my craft nights! That group really lifts my spirits! Despite being extremely challenged by simple stockinette I have managed to make some progress on it and hope to wear it this year.

Yes, I have been dropping stitches all over the place, but hopefully they won’t show too much after it’s been blocked. No matter how carefully I repair them, I still feel like everybody can see exactly where they are. Or is it just me? I feel like my brain is taking a vacation, involuntarily, while my ankle is healing.

I have about one and a half of a skein of yarn to go to finish this shawl/poncho. It is interminable, but what else do I have to do.

Well, actually I do have a few other things I want to do! For example I decided to branch out from my current repertoire and try hooking.

Some lovely Twitter friends shared a beautiful crocheted blanket of floral-based granny squares and the colors were just so delightful I had to try it. I impulsively bought the first installment of a kit for this blankets and I have no idea what to do now.

I’m having another yet ankle procedure on Thursday, so while I’m home recuperating I shall indulge myself on YouTube and try to learn a few of the basic crochet stitches so I can attempt this beautiful British pattern.

It is called the Happy Blanket from The Mercerie in England and I hope my friends at craft night can help me with the crocheting aspect as well.

(this is craft night)
(P.S. The saddest part about craft night is really can’t tolerate any alcohol right now, not even my favorite Lime-a-Rita.)

I found a bit of cotton yarn and tried to make a dishcloth. I think it came out really nicely, but I swear it fried up all the remaining brain cells I had because it shouldn’t have been this hard, and after just completing one I feel like I’m done.

I have enough of the yarn to make about five more, if I can wrap my head around that!

I also bought a beautiful pattern that I saw on my friend Chris’s Facebook page, another Ruth Sorenson pattern using Kauni yarn done in fair isle and depicting Scottish thistles in a beautiful design. Since I’m Scottish, I figured I had to make this so perhaps someday I will. Here is the Flowers of Scotland Shawl.

(Ruth’s photo from her Ravelry page)

It’s just beautiful, I love the colors, but is much too ambitious for me right now. Her designs are lovely but her pattern instructions are possibly not translated in the best possible manner from their original Danish (or is it Norwegian?) for my current levels of comprehension.

This section made me cry.

Increase 1 st on both sides of the
shawl as shown on the chart. Increase
each row 3 times, then knit 1 row without
increasing etc.

Oh my.

Before my first minor procedure last month, I had finished one sock of this really cool pattern and started the cuff of the second sock, and then lost the pattern and I can’t figure out where I got it from or where it might’ve gone to. It was on my bed when I came home from surgery and then it is gone. It is not under the bed, it is not on my dresser, or on the coffee table, or in my pile of baskets of knitting and yarn. So I’m a bit stuck. Perhaps I’ll do what my friend Kathy at Princess Animal does and just knit a second stock in a completely different pattern and say to heck with it.

I still also have the Swiss cheese scarf using Knitwits ombre yarn. I just cannot count properly right now in order to get the buttonholes to offset properly.

This, by the way, is officially the world’s worst photograph of me. Ever. Please just look at the beautiful yarn that I’m holding up and imagine you can’t see anything else. Thank you.

So as you can see, I have been thinking a lot about knitting, but not actually doing much of it. I’m hoping this brain fugue is just temporary and a side effect of the pain medication they have given me, and not some permanent vast wasteland of stupidity that will afflict my creative processes forever.