Typing

I have concluded that Woats prefers knitting to writing as human past-times. While both activities tend to pin the human in one place, knitting can easily be carried on over and around the cat, while the cat is forced to be Very Firm with the human that a laptop (despite the name), does not belong on the human's lap. The cat does.

This is why I have the computer balanced on the back of the couch and the cat firmly ensconced on the lap while I try to make it through another ten thousand words of the novel before Monday. It's going to be close.

Out of Excuses

Yesterday I was on the road, and considering the amount of time I spent sitting, there was no reason for me to keep falling asleep today--but when I finally got enough caffeine into my system to sustain consciousness for awhile, I decided there was going to be no more pussyfooting around. If I got nothing else done today, that colorwork sweater was going to be finished.

Well, I didn't get much else done, but:


I think that in the end, I made the placket neck more complicated than it needed to be. I did go with both an inner and outer facing. The result is thicker than I liked, but will allow the sweater to be worn partially unzipped without exposing the zipper or steeked edges. It also involved at various points having different sections of the facing and neck on three different needles, as well as a needle with sewing thread. As techniques go, it was neither pretty nor clever- but it did give me more or less the result I was aiming for.

Here's a view of the neck finishing.


Don't ask about the novel- I've been away from the computer almost all weekend. My husband and I spent a lot of our long car trip talking about it, but mostly it was fairly silly. I don't think his suggestion of a chase scene on riding lawnmowers is going to make it into this (or any) draft. The bad guys' secret lair on a submarine may have potential, however.

Small Progress

Okay, I finally did the third steek on the colorwork sweater and started knitting facings, but these teensy bits of sweater are looking like taking longer than the rest of the sweater put together. Yes, because I'm not working on them. Your point? All right, it's actually because I need the facings, the sweater and the zipper all in one place, preferably with sewing stuff, which means at home. And non-traveling projects are not getting much love.

The monkey socks are getting lots of love, but responding slowly, since they're still on 00 needles. (I'll take a picture of them Real Soon Now.)

Rumors of Top Secret Christmas Knitting can neither be confirmed nor denied at this time.

And of course the real activity that's consuming a big chunk of my at-home time and most of my brain: My steam locomotive is currently somewhere in Pennsylvania running out of coal, with the bad guys stuck on the wrong side of a flooded river. Which is a big improvement over yesterday, when it looked like the bad guys were going to shoot all the good guys and make this into a short story. (I was kind of on the fence about whether this was a good thing or not.) On the plus side, I'm still behind schedule, but I have broken 25,000 words. It's half done! Now if I can just figure out what the bad guys' actual Plan is, (as opposed to Just Being Bad), I might actually make it through this draft.