Thursday, February 17, 2011

Knitting without tears

This arrived last week:

I got it for the famous percentage system (designing sweaters with chest measurement, number of stitches per inch, and then percentages of the resulting numbers for the sleeves and neck and so on) and stayed for the writing.  And the yoke sweater pattern, which is lovely.

This is the thing with me about Elizabeth Zimmermann.  So many people are devoted to her for her engineering  genius, but while I did enjoy the mysteries of her baby surprise jacket I love her for her writing.  Such a great voice, such a perfect command of the English language and all its grammatical ticks!  She could write about sprockets and I'd buy her books.

Moving on:

There were many danishes on my holiday yesterday, but at the much-closer-to-home bakery than the pineapple danish source (we chose raspberry danish, blueberry cream cheese danish, chocolate croissant, sugar-topped brioche) plus a luxurious lunch from the Posh Grocery (turkey and avocado wrap) and No Carol (she kindly allowed me to reschedule till Friday, but I am still seeing her this morning so I will in fact be doing penance for the pastries in about an hour.)

I started the cowl to match Carol's hat:

and then stopped because what if the hat is too small? then I can simply finish the cowl as a hat, since I used the pattern one size up for the cowl.  With luck and fast drying time because the pattern is so fast to knit if I'm just home and not doing laundry - what a hope - I could give either the correctly-sized hat or the matching cowl to her tomorrow.

That's what I call Knitting Without Tears - but I still need a fix for frogging without tears, because I still seem to be doing an awful lot of mournful frogging and reknitting.  Is this a reflection of my absentmindedness, or my growing patience in striving for perfection? I must say I'm more conscious of the former than the latter.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Love EZ! I agree, I just love reading her. One Sunday, i was reading one of her books and started laughing. The Husband asked what I was reading. He was quite surprised when I told him!

Brendaknits said...

I am an EZ lover. last year I devoted my knitting my entire knitting year to knitting as EZ did. Her style, techniques, patterns. But I
also lover her writing style. It was Elizabeth that first taught me the meaning of the word penultimate.