So much nonprogress!

All the crochet has been sort of sitting on the sidelines while I rip out and reknit a beanie for a friend. This has to be the fifth time I’ve knitted it after starting over, but this time the fit is just right — it’s just half an inch too short.

It’s actually pretty tricky. The friend likes very tight-fitting hats. This means I’ve had to come up with a bind-off that can stretch to twice its usual width but that still fits closely, without that horrible single circuit of too-tight bind-off that makes it feel like you’re wearing a skinny steel band around your head.

There’s a stretchy bind-off I tried that sorta works except it made the edge sort of … ripply. Almost lacy. Not a solution for a guy’s hat. But I got the idea of the bind-off; in it, you pass one stich over the next as usual, but then you pass that stitch back onto the left needle and knit it again. Essentially, it’s adding a crochet chain stitch in between the regular knitted stitches.

My compromise was a nice, neat bind-off where I worked the loops off the knitting needles with a crochet hook, and chained one between every other bound-off stitch. Stretchy, tight-fitting and neat-looking. I AM A GENIUS. Now I just need to add that last half-inch to it and crochet on the bear ears and it will be done!

Which is good, because of course the one thing my friends needs now (mid-July in California) is a 100-percent-wool hat, right?

A sense of progress

A piece of the purse is done! This is mostly because instead of cleaning the garage or going out to a party in the city or clearing the desk or handling the pile of thrift-store fabric piled between the bed and the dresser, I hung out watching “A Life Less Ordinary” and crocheting. This is alarming: I haven’t started any other projects since I started working on this bag, and I haven’t abandoned it halfway through and stashed it in with the growing yarn pile. Yet. The bag will have four feet of strap instead of six because I was losing my mind with the stupid seven-stitch-wide boredom machine. I was running out of yarn, anyway.

Now the strap is blocking. By “blocking,” I mean “it’s getting the hell blocked out of it.” I attached the two ends to make a big loop, soaked it with water, hung the loop over the shower head and hung one of my big enameled pots off the bottom with a coathanger. Now it looks stretched out like someone’s neck in the movies when a highwayman holds a sharp knife to someone’s throat and demands all their money and the person’s head is held so high up to get away from the blade that you can hear him breathing funny. Ahh, cotton, the fiber that takes all the abuse you can dish out and begs for more.

Now if I can just find my pins, I can cure the other two pieces that are supposed to be rectangular of their slight but definite trapezoidal tendencies and then the bag will be ready for assembly and finishing! And then photography! And then it will be flung as far from me as possible because no way in hell would I carry around a pink bag with me in public.

Not for more than a couple days, anyway.

I would post, but …

… the only thing more boring than crocheting six feet of strap for a purse would be reading about it.