Magdalen is growing...not quite like a weed, but there's some real progress being made. I love those gorgeous, thick cables, and the pattern, though not quite memorized yet, is actually fairly intuitive and I only need to glance at it from time to time. The funny thing is I don't have a printer, and really didn't want to be looking on my phone all the timer the pattern, so I wrote it out, line by line. Yes, for real, all 28 rows. Crazy. My little crumpled up sheet of notebook paper gets more and more crumpled with each day I knit this. I have so far done eleven or so pattern repeats, and I'm supposed to do seventeen. And when I say eleven pattern repeats, I'm being optimistic in that this morning I was at about nine, so surely I must be at eleven now, right? In all honesty it's probably more like ten. But sometimes you need to just lie to yourself about where things are really at. It can be good for the knitting morale. And, please don't misquote or misunderstand me- I don't condone actual lying, of course! Just a little exaggeration to the knitting hands and brain that are ready to call it quits. Sometimes they just need that little bit of extra encouragement to keep them from discarding the current project and casting it aside for a new, better knitting project.
Sometimes you need to lie to those little knitting hands and tell them that no, they've actually knit 14 inches, not 12, on that sweater sleeve, and really only another inch or two remains, because they're attached to short arms! Then, after a couple of inches more, and the sleeve measures four inches, you should just tell your hands, "Oh come on, it wasn't that bad! Those couple inches flew by! Now it really is 14 inches long, and that's not far from a 16 inch sleeve!" Then, after those couple inches, you just say, "See! it's long enough! But you know how much you love extra long sleeves...what's another inch or three after knitting 16?" This is how a knitter has to think to boost the morale on some of those never ending projects.
On this scarf, I started out saying, "At least knit until it's long enough to become a hat. Okay, now it's long enough to be a doll blanket! Now it's long enough to be a strange sort of cowl! Now it's almost seven repeats long. Remember at first you thought the pattern actually said seven repeats, and then when you realized it actually said seventeen, you thought maybe seven would do? Just get to seven and you can be done!"
And, so it goes...I'm sticking to this one, to the bitter end.
