Last night I turned the heel on my sock-in-progress. This morning I did some of the heel flap on the way to work (it’s based on the Widdershins toe-up heel-flap pattern, so the heel gusset is first, then the turn, then the flap) and after about six rows, realized I have about two stitches left on one side of the flap and five on the other. Either I missed a decrease somewhere or I miscounted when I started the flap, so there is ripping out in my future.
I realized something else this morning; one of my oldest friends is six months pregnant and I’ve just realized the knitting implications. Quick, get out the pattern books! Review the stash! It will depend on what yarn I have or can get – at least for this project I can buy some locally, since an acrylic blend is not out of place for a baby gift. But should I make a little kimono? Or maybe a mitered-square blanket? Or tiny socks and a hat? I’m not that worried about finishing in time for the birth, as long as whatever I make is big enough when she gets it and at least not too far after the birth.
It’s been an episodic sort of friendship: we went to school together for third and fourth grade, somehow kept in touch when she moved to a different district, met again in the gifted program in 7th grade (when they bused a lot of us from a few different schools to one place for enrichment classes one day a week), went through high school together, and then went to the same college, though we saw each other only occasionally there. But we’ve kept in touch, on and off, since we were … (pause to do the math) closer to her unborn daughter’s age than to our own current ages. She’s the best thing I got from my few scouting years: they told us, as Brownies, to be nice to new kids in school and she was the only chance I had to try it out. After Brownie meetings, when my mom was our tropp leader, she and her mom, my mom and I and my then-toddler brother would go out for fried chicken at Roy Rogers, back when they sold “Pappy Parker’s fri-i-i-i-ied chicken!”. (Her parents were divorced and I guess my dad must have been still at work.) We’re forty now; I probably won’t have any kids and she may not have any more than this one. I should have thought about it sooner. I’m not a fast knitter, but I do want to make something special.
since everyone always makes baby clothing or blankets, why not try to knit a stuff animal (teddy?) and stuff it. How about an angora rabbit? or a big panda bear? Much more original and something she can never outgrow.
Implications? Acrylic, by all means, so that it doesn’t need to be washed by hand! I did a zigzag afghan for my dearest friend’s first child, in pink, blue and white. For her second, I did yellow, blue and white — a bit of child psychology, her brother’s blanket was similar to hers but *not the same.* She was so attached to that blanket that she took it with her for years; then she left it in a hotel and couldn’t sleep without it. So I made her another, a smaller one (didn’t have much baby yarn left, and it was an *emergency* after all). The whole family was so grateful that they redid my son’s room — paint, wallpapere and curtains! Good lord, those two babies both got married in 2005!