Progress

The bottom of the felted backpack I'm knitting flew along smoothly in a simple stockinette stitch. Soon it was time to pick up stitches along the selvage. The pattern called for 26 stitches to be picked up. Now, it instantly occured to me that this was going to be tricky since I was probably knitting at a tighter guage than the pattern and would therefore have a different number of rows than the original pattern assumed. Wise minds would also point out that I probably needed to pick up MORE stitches in order to retain the proper shape, given that my guage was tighter; this didn't occur to me, however (assignment: discuss the juxtaposition of those 2 statements among yourselves, then vow that you will never ever publicly mention your conclusion).

So, wouldn't that be a cool real-life math problem? You know, the sort of thing a cool homeschool mom would just jump right into. Maybe not even say, "Okay, you tell me what I should do," but do that musing-out-loud that draws the kids into the conversation. Too bad I'm not a cool homeschool mom. Maybe someone else out in blogland can use that idea.

I know it's fashionable to say, "Eeew, math, I don't want to do the math!" That isn't the problem here. I'm fine with doing the math. I'm not fine with getting up and finding a ruler and counting the stitches. Heck, if I wanted to do stuff like THAT I would've done a guage swatch. So I'm focusing on the thoughts that a) it's just a bag, for pete's sake, which is going to be filled with lumpy stuff anyway, so it doesn't matter if it starts out sort of lumpy and msshapen, and 2) felting covers a multitude of sins.

I call this the Rationalization Method of knitting. Knit, make mistakes, rationalize why you don't bother to fix them.

Progress in showing-off-of-knitting: The moebius wrap made it's debut when I wore it to church. During Meet-n-Greet time the woman in front of me turned around and exclaimed, "Oh My! Did you knit that?!" It was really gratifying. Her biggest question was, "Where did you get that yarn?!" Really, the Silkspun would make pretty much anything look swanky. It's definitely a case of the yarn carrying the knitting.

Progress in finding books I need to buy: I took a detour into Borders and discovered that I really really need a copy of Alterknits . I also realized my subscription to Mothering has lapsed after about 10 years -- there was one on the magazine rack that I hadn't seen. It was an odd feeling, like seeing an old friend hanging out with her new crowd you're not part of.

No progress to report on putting up more of the playset. We got out the pieces of the swingset and looked at it. Then we put them away. In the meantime, roving bands of small children were climbing over the parts we had already set up, then running to the playset at a house about a block away. I think they're coping with the lack of swings.

And progress in health? Mr.V has decided to go gluten-free. This is taking up an amazing amount of time, as it involves figuring out new patterns in shopping. Most of my time at Mothering.com has been spent cruising the Nutrition forum.