When Nina was here, I was experimenting and frogging. I woke up the next morning with a mental image of exactly what I really was trying to knit: not this ribbing pattern, not that drop-stitch wave that I’d been trying the evening before, but what I really wanted to knit. For that male nurse.
Baby cables and ribbing framing, in the center of a soft scarf, a knit-purl-patterned hypodermic needle. Such a basic part of his everyday work, and yet something that has been so vitally important to my life the two times I’ve seen him. And he has such a deft touch with them. I pictured the whole thing and worked out the stitch count across the scarf as I lay there–all of which I promptly forgot when I got out of bed, but I later sat myself down on the couch and made myself work it back out again. My brain had it once, I could do it again. I did.
I really, really like it. It’s one of those things where, if you know what you’re looking at, it’s obvious. If you don’t, it’s a pretty pattern. I’m knitting it in the worsted-weight Misti Baby Alpaca Royal I bought at Stitches West a year ago, that I’d wondered why I’d bought such a (for me) heavy yarn. (I know why, it was one of the softest yarns in the whole show and that was the weight it came in. Period.) It’s not spun so loosely that it’ll fall apart at all, and yet, because of the fine micron count and fiber type, it is nevertheless exquisitely soft–the spinners at the mill got the balance exactly right. It’s perfect.
And then I’ll do one with x cables in the center for the x-ray technician.
Meantime, here is the bouquet from Nina, the roses from Phyl and Lee, and the last flower on Sue’s: which has been blooming, with a one-week break in the middle, since the first week of December. Wow.