Convalescent

My husband left to drive to the country on a mysterious errand around 7 this morning, so I got up and came out into the living room and knit while listening to the Goldberg Variations. And enjoyed that sense of peace of one who is recovering from something.

You see: as soon as my friends left, I came down with a terrible case of startitis.

After all those days of not knitting, running around New York, trying to get my work done at night while playing hard with my friends all day, and even jaunting up to Boston overnight for work, I had a physical craving to play with yarn.

It overcame me on the plane back from Boston when I started this.


Everyone recognizes this by now - it's the first of a pair of Nona's Sidewinders.

I hope it's not contagious.

And after my friends left, the floodgates opened. I sat down with four skeins of yarn to play with. And I started this.



It's the Kitchen Sink Bag from Knitty.com.

There are some patterns that spark, in the heart, an unreasonable obsession - one sees it and knows one has to have it. This is one. It's a good thing I feel that way, because this is a tough knit - or else I am just not very good at forcing fat needles through the backs and sides of obdurate stitches. But I keep going back to the picture of the bag, which triggers my fantasies of summer: the perfect container for a beach towel, the sunscreen, and a nice fat book.

There is only one cure for Startitis. And that is to finish something.

Alas: in the inky pit that is black sock yarn on knitting needles, which swallows up stitch definition, ideas of order, and, at times, sanity, I briefly lost my way and, for a few ribs only, purled where I should have knit. So I have to rip back two or three rows to eliminate a handful of raised stitches. Therefore, finishing will have to wait til later today. (Though it seems a waste of valuable time that could be spent knitting, I do have to do some actual paid work, as well.)

So I present: 99% of a sock-pal sock.