What's up with the knitting...

Last weekend I went to Warsaw and came back with a bag brimming with cotton. Usually I don't knit with any kind of cotton, since it is so hard on my hands, but I have made up my mind--I will have summer tops--and knitting with cotton goes along with that assertion.

Cotton is a denser fiber than wool (this I say with no actual knowledge at all) and when you spin it, it's as if the fiber goes tight and hard instead of light and fluffy. The weight of it when it gets wet causes it to stretch, and because it is cotton, it doesn't bounce back to what it was before.

Also, it makes my hands cramp up as I knit with it, particularly my right pinkie finger. I had no idea this finger was in any way involved in knitting, or that it would be damaged by knitting with cotton, linen, silk, or the like, but there you go.

However, the Rowan Pure Life that I selected for this project (the Summer Scabbard by Stitch Diva) is spun in such a way that it does spring back a little. And if the gauge swatch is any indication, there won't be very much pain involved in the knitting of it.

Now, though, I have found that I am missing the two needles that I need to get started. And I won't be able to get up to Warsaw myself unless I bend the time space continuum and make the conference happen on the same day as my normal weekend. I don't get a weekend this week.

So I am thinking I will zip up to Warsaw on Thursday morning, waking with the sun and traveling across the country with a distinct schedule, not to be varied from.

We'll see.

Meanwhile, I reached the bodice of the Lotus Blossom Tank (Tee, in my case). And as I did so, I discovered that the medium size (which I am knitting to avoid feeling fat or uncomfortable with a shirt underneath it) works perfectly until the bodice. So I tore it out to the decrease and put it on a size smaller needles. Two of them, because the only circulars I had were around 20" not 32" or 40" which would actually have worked.

Which is why I am buying more needles, in the first place.

And so, I decreased down to the size small for the bodice, because I am a size small up top, as my friends know.

Well, I knit on the two circs for a few rows, then as I transitioned into the bodice, I switched back to the larger needle. Because I just could not knit the other way, and the yarn didn't look as well on smaller ones.

We'll see if it works.