More on Moebius Knitting

I was going to post this yesterday, but Alex-the-door-guy arrived bright and early, and immediately got to work ripping out our front doors, which, aside from being icky and wooden were double doors, so we had a 6 foot wide hole gaping in the front of the house. And, since it was about 38 degrees outside, it was just a bit drafty. It was the sort of situation where you find yourself really taking stock of what you need to blog about. Like, right now I should be washing the dishes from last night (since I was quite sidetracked after supper -- more on that later), but I've wandered in here mid-wash with a glass of coffee-flavored Silk (I just discovered this stuff since we moved here; they used to sell Silk latte, but that has disappered; is this the same stuff?). I'm okay with ditching the dishes, but sitting in a cold draft to type on the computer was beyond me.

Sitting around knitting was also beyond me. KidV1 got some knitting done, though. The whole door replacement was quite loud, so the kids decided to listen to a book on tape, and KidV1 knit during that. I think she's making a cape for her sister's stuffed rabbit.

I ended up doing stuff like mopping the floor, sweeping the dead leaves and dropped kindling from the patio, sweeping out the garage, and then, yes, even going up to the master bedroom to removed more wallpaper. It's a nasty business up there, with 2 layers of wallpaper.

Speaking of wallpaper, as Alex-the-door-guy was taking off the door jamb for the doors into the living room (double 6 panel doors, now replaced with double 15-light french doors), he unearthed the original wallpaper of the entrance. He even cut a piece of it off the wall as a souvenir. Wow. Green and golden flowers, marching up and down the walls in stripes. As he was removing the front door we discovered that underneath the ugly parquet floor in the entrance is even uglier vinyl in an olive green floral pattern. This raises the question: Did someone put that floor with that wallpaper? And, if so, what were they thinking?

In the course of putting in the new front door (now a single door with sidelights; we finally have some natural light in the entrance, hurray!) the woodwork was moved over about an inch, which left an unpainted gap. Since the wallpaper has been painted over umpteen times (note: painting over wallpaper is BAD), it was pretty thick and we were going to have to use drywall mud to even out the surface. But when Mr.V got home he started niggling at the edge and discovered that the wallpaper would rip right off. Woohoo! My purpose in life is to rid the world of wallpaper, so I spent the rest of the evening ripping down all of the stuff in the entrance. It was a truly satisfying evening.

Anyway, none of that has to do with moebius knitting, or moebius anything (unless we put a big Escher print in the entrance, but if we did that I'd not choose the moebius; I'd choose something like Cycle ) (for the record, we had a book of Escher prints which I spent hours and hours browsing when I was little).

Fuzzy Galore has a page about moebius knitting here . I do have a quibble, though, in that one may infer from the next to last paragraph that one forms a moebius by twisting a circular cast on. Yes and no. If you completely twist a circular around, you end up with a 2 sided, 2 edged object with a complete twist in it; a moebius has 1 surface and 1 edge, and a half twist.

You can find online instruction on how to cast on a moebius at several sites, including here , but reading through these I picture that first row being tough to knit. Cat Bordhi's cast on is super easy, and easy to knit. Once you have the cast on done and the first row knit (easy if you use Cat's instructions!), moebius knitting can be as easy or as difficult as you would like to make it. You can simply knit row after row peacefully and mindlessly, or you can do lace. Whatever. What's cool is that no matter what you do, it looks tricky and mind boggling.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled dishwashing.