Forgotten

The other day, I forgot to shut my door to my room and the dogs decided to make it their little playland for a bit. When I got home there were bits of polyester stuffing for the bears I'm knitting for my nephews' christmas presents, some papers scattered about and a few balls of yarn here and there (aside from the ones that are always randomly littering my room with their yarny goodness). On the bed, I found the lace shawl I started knitting 2 years ago (I'm guessing at this because my memory of the time I bought the yarn for it is a little hazy). It's a circular shawl (based on Elizabeth Zimmerman's Pi shawl) and each round takes twenty to thirty minutes, as I've gotten to the point where there are 576 stitches on the needle. Since I've gotten to that number of stitches, my knitting discipline with this project has been very lax. I'd knit a round here, half a round there. It was not getting any bigger. Now, I've been thinking about the yarn (it's a silk/flax/nylon blend in a muted salmon color) and was planning on frogging the whole thing and making something comepletely different. Then I got to looking at it and remembering all the work I put into it, especially the section of solid eyelet done with a modified knit 2 together where the needle is inserted purlwise in the first stitch and knitwise in the second stitch, resulting in a nearly perfectly reversable fabric. I thought about the times I had to knit back, sometimes 2 whole rounds, because I was so afraid to take it off and rip back to the place I messed up (I was a fairly green knitter when I started it...I have a bit more experience under my belt now). It was painstaking work, hours of my life, and I felt pangs of guilt at the thought of ripping her off the needles. I just couldn't do it, so I finished the round that was started and knit another and part of another before I went to bed. The next day, I knit on it some more and I'm planning on finishing the shawl, maybe not soon, but some day. And who knows, maybe I'll have enough yarn left over for a different shawl, because it was a pound of thick and thin (or more acurately, thin and thinner) yarn that varies from fingering to lace weight. But that's another time. Right now I have people to see and stitches to knit, so until next time, toodles.