Been a long time since the man-eating plant got into the blog. ‘Bout time. Photographing projects there requires that I stand in the sunlight: I can do that now. Not for too long, but hey, cool, progress.

When I put my zinnia scarf in my book, I did it first in a very bright, soft, fluffy, reddish-orange yarn, because the story was about a four-year-old African-American child; that was exactly the kind of thing I imagined she would have reached for first. I knitted it originally in two pieces, kitchenered at the top. Now, I don’t kitchener-stitch often enough to be as breezily comfortable with it as I’d like to be, and I kept coming back to the thought that a lot of people wouldn’t attempt it, or would have the finished halves as terminal UFOs in their closets.

So I tossed that idea aside, finally, and reworked the motif as bottom-up and top-down, figuring that anybody who preferred the sharper bottom-up version and didn’t mind kitchenering would know enough to be able to work out the idea of knitting it in two pieces if they wanted. But I wanted to offer a way out for those who sit there, computer screen or book on one side, project in hand, trying to figure out how on earth do you do this grafting thing just right, and why is it hard to remember from the last time…? (One could also do a three-needle bindoff, but it would add a somewhat flattened-out sideways line.)

The computer program I’m typing on is refusing to accept “kitchen” with any suffix added on as a normal word. And I’m finding it highly amusing.