For two weeks I woke up in the morning with the thought of don’t waste time before starting in on that afghan, you only have till the 31st, and spending the day all the way till bedtime alternating between knitting, thinking of knitting, resting my hands from knitting, and being grateful for the distraction from Stupid Things My Health Does.

I did, I got to start the atmospheric river blue above the San Francisco Bay fog line while said river was pounding away out there in the storm. I had wanted those times to overlap and they did.

This evening I glanced towards the lowering sun and decided to take a picture while there was still at least some natural light.

Kat had second-guessed herself and wondered if I would want hooks on the slab of my redwood she’d polished for me so that it could become a wallhanging. That made me wonder, as I was knitting, if I should make it possible for her afghan to be the wallhanging, and that became the plan.

I was going to knit a plain section at the top after the darker blue: to start it off by doubling the number of stitches, putting every other one on a holder, knitting a plain band twice the height of what you’d want in order to run a dowel through and then double-needle-binding-off it along with those held stitches at the back of the afghan. One horizontal pocket across, coming up!

But when it came right down to it during those last few rows? When I laid it out for this picture?

Nahhh.

I will offer to add it, and if she wants me too I will in a heartbeat, just like she would have added hooks in a heartbeat, but for my eyes I’m going to leave it the way it looks best. Just like she did.

Edited to add: and after I laid it out a second time once it was finished and could only get bad photos with my 6S phone that I’m not going to besmirch all that hard work with by posting here, I finally found the stitch I’d been looking for. The one that was why I was missing one when counting out the center stitch for where the lace edging would meet up in the center at the top.

Can you see it in this picture? I didn’t either. I didn’t find it when I was knitting, either, no matter how much I looked for it, and I did.

I dropped it about the time I hit the tippy top of the tree. At the inner edge of the lace on the left. Probably when I put the thing down to run answer the landline.

So I grabbed a length of white yarn, looped through the one left hanging as if I were finally knitting it, connecting it where it should have been connected to and then ran the ends in along the back.

From the front you could never know. From the back, almost so.

That was close!

It feels so weird not to have this huge project hanging over my head anymore. It’s like, what do I even do with my needles now? I’d better decide quick because I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow and the next day and the cardiologist hasn’t even seen the monitor results yet as far as I know.

A Malabrigo Mecha hat is always a good and soft and warm and useful thing. But after nineteen skeins of the stuff in two weeks, um, let’s go try something else.