Down to the wire

The amazing thing about this post is that I wrote it on the train on my way to work. Not because it is amazing that the technology exists to allow me to blog from the train (which is also amazing) but because it means that I wasn’t frantically knitting my shawl, which is what I’ve spent every other train journey recently doing. For various reason, I had even less time to knit the shawl than I expected to have and it was beginning to look like it might not get finished.

Actually, since the pattern was due first, I had to finish writing that without having finished knitting the shawl so the shawl is artfully draped in the pattern photographs to try to disguise the fact that half of its border is missing! The pattern was finished and submitted on Tuesday (also on the train to work) and from then till I handed the sample in yesterday just about every waking minute that I wasn’t been at work was spent knitting.

In the end, the timetable for finishing it went something like this:

Wednesday

18:10 – catch train home from work, knit whole way home

19:00 – arrive home from work, start knitting again

20:00 – stop knitting long enough to eat pizza which had just been delivered

21:00 – contemplate possibility that it’s actually impossible to finish knitting shawl tonight, keep knitting anyway

22:00 – decide that it is possible but that it’s going to be midnight before it’s done

23:00 – Steven goes to bed

00:15 – knit last stitch of edging, decide to leave grafting of edging till morning

01:00 – go to bed having pinned shawl out to block

Various times during the night – wake up from a nightmare that I accidentally brought the shawl to bed and it’s started unravelling, double-check to make sure that shawl isn’t actually in bed unravelling

Thursday

06:30 – curse the person who invented alarm clocks

06:50 – get up, make coffee, get dressed and ready for work

07:10 – force Steven to admire shawl before letting him leave for work

07:25 – realise shawl is still damp, get hair-dryer and dry shawl

07:45 – graft ends of edging and weave in remaining ends

07:55 – take some very quick, very blurry pictures of shawl which will almost certainly turn out to be completely useless for anything

08:03 – realise that I should have left for work 3 minutes ago, put shawl in bag and run for train

8:16 – actually catch train

12:00 – pop out of office during lunch to travel across city to deliver shawl

13:00 – shawl delivered, normal service resumes

Now that the dust has settled and I’ve had a good night’s sleep, I am looking forward to the shawl’s unveiling at this weekend’s Glasgow School of Yarn where it is my entry in their design competition.  I can’t make it along during the day today but I will be there tonight for the party to celebrate The Yarn Cake‘s second birthday and the results of the competition.

And on the way home on the train I’ll be frantically knitting the gauge swatch that is my pre-class homework for the hat design workshop that I’m attending at the Glasgow School of Yarn tomorrow!

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