February 6th

Right on schedule, it’s the sixth of February!  My favorite ‘two birds with one stone’ day…Mom’s Birthday and my blogiversary here at FogKnits (#7), ensuring for all perpetuity, fresh blog content on this day, each year.  The traditional 7^th anniversary gift is copper and wool. We’re going to pretend it’s copper OR wool and say I nailed it! Happy Birthday, Mom!

The wool in question is Karaoke from South West Trading Company.  It’s a wool/soy blend that saw it’s heyday at least 10 years ago.  It came to me in the annual year end yarn swap my knitting group does.  The rules in this situation are pretty clear…if you cast on right away, it doesn’t become stash.  So I did.  And that’s how I knit an unintentional amoeba.

The pattern started as the Prismatic Honeycomb shawl by Kira K. I’ve had this pattern in my queue for a while.  I like it’s modular nature and it’s scraptastic possibilities.  I thought I would work well for my colors so off I went without deeper thought. 

Turns out though, knitting allows ample opportunity for deeper thought.  It’s not exactly a quick process, ya know?  I had to think about something.  At first it was all the ends I was going to have to weave.  Boo.  Then it was ‘I have to cast on and join, being careful not to twist’ how many times??  UGH.   Finally, I couldn’t stop thinking about the all stockinette nature of this design.   As written, the border is stockinette, as well as the whole body of the shawl.  And the border was only along the bottom edge, so the top of the shawl was practically a raw edge.  And this is where the plan fell apart.

I played around with some different knit edges, including an applied garter stitch border with stripes a la WestKnits MKAL this year.  I didn’t like it though.  I couldn’t come up with a single reason to pick up stitches around the entirety of a shawl either.  At this point, I decided to give crochet a try.   And it worked!  There was some minor griping about how crochet picot might be more fiddly than knit picot but it solved my edge problem beautifully!  And that’s really how I ‘knit’ an unintentional amoeba.

I’ve still got some Karaoke left too…I’ve got another plan.  LOL.  Let’s see how long I stick to it this time…