Twisted Loops

I’ve never really been one of those knitters with eight million projects going at the same time.  I tend to be faithful to one “big” project and maybe a pair of socks.  Items in my works in process pile usually get finished before I begin a new project.  Usually.

Back in early January, I cast on for the Handsome Triangle shawl from Victorian Lace Today.  I raced through the shawl.  The pattern was easy to memorize, the yarn wonderfully soft.  It was such enjoyable knitting.  The yarn was handling the texture of the lace nicely.

Within a few weeks of knitting, I made it to the last pattern row.  I consulted the book to see how the bind off should be handled and there it was…*ch8, sc into next shawl stitch, ch4, sc into next shawl stitch*.  How had I missed this?  The shawl called for a looped crochet bind off.  Now, I have some basic crochet skills, but my crochet is not as even as my knitting.  I did not want to ruin all of my hard work with a wonky edging that wasn’t to the same quality as the rest of the work.  The best thing to do, I thought, was to set it aside for a few days while I decided what to do about the edging.  That was back in January.  Tuesday night I dug through my knitting area trying to find my chibi to graft the toe ends of my Monkey socks.  While looking, I found the shawl hiding in a box.  It looked like this.

There it sat, still at the last pattern row, on live needles, waiting for the bind off.  Five months of sitting in a box, not being worked on.  I decided to do something about it.  Last night I started weaving in all of the ends.  Sure, it’s a bit more procrastination before working on the bind off for the shawl.  But, see all of the messy ends in the corner of the photo?  There’s quite a bit of work to be done on this thing.  My goal is to finish the bind off for this shawl and get it blocked this weekend or early next week.  Making my goal public makes it more likely to be finished.

In the spirit of confession, I’ll also confess to the following.  What could it be?  It’s tracking information from UPS.  I’m receiving two boxes today, 19 pounds each.  What on earth could this have to do with the knitting blog?  It couldn’t possibly be yarn…could it?