setbacks

Well, the “startitis” of my last post well relatively short-lived – in fact, I’ve hardly knit at all since the last time I posted. Partly this is just a matter of the semester ramping up – my students are turning in assignments, which means I need to read them and give them feedback, plus there are some big conference deadlines coming up. But there’s also this:

If you’ve been following along for awhile, you know I have some kind of nasty health issues, and in particular, that I’ve got some problems with my back. Well, it turns out that if I don’t take good care of myself, and try to keep up with my spouse in the never-ending battle against the snow, and carry around heavy bags, and then have a 12 pound cat who insists on laying on my legs for an entire night, I will wake up in excruciating pain and completely unable to bend. No fun at all! Especially since I had to wait to take my muscle relaxants until I was done teaching and otherwise being professional for the day (they make me sleepy and stupid).

Anyway, I’m doing a bit better now, and am mostly back to “normal”, but one thing in particular isn’t going to be happening for awhile: sewing. This is really frustrating, as I was just starting to get caught up with the NewBee squares, and starting to feel slightly more like I knew what I was doing. But my sewing situation here at home is not at all conducive to working with a bad back – I cut crawling on hands and knees on the floor, and sew at our kitchen table, which is wobbly and not the right height. It just can’t be done right now, which is a serious bummer. I’ve been looking into things I could do to make sewing possible, and have found things like this table, which would actually work in our house (since it folds up small and rolls away, both of which are musts), but has a pretty steep pricetag. I guess I’ll just have to start saving up!

I haven’t forgotten my knitting, don’t worry! I couldn’t knit for almost a week, but last night I took some time to rip out the deep-v shaping on my garter rib cardigan so that I could reknit it using the tutorial I’m working on:

The slope is more gradual this time around, and it’s looking better. I’ve got both sleeves knit, so the next step will be to join everything together and begin the seamless set-in sleeve shaping. I’ll give all sorts of details about this kind of shaping in the tutorial, but the basic idea is that by varying the rate of decreases, the direction of decreases, and whether you’re taking stitches away from the body or the sleeve, you can create a set-in sleeve seamlessly, working from the bottom up. I’m a big fan of this treatment (I used it on The Swatch and the Ganseyette, as well as another design that you’ll be hearing more about later this year), so I’m really looking forward to this next stage of the knitting.