Maths and meditation

According to one of the 7000 or so free magazines that drop through our door every week "Recent research proves that knitting..has incredible therapeutic benefits and that the act of knitting actually changes your brainwave patterns producing a higher Alpha-wave output than yoga or meditation". This is great news for me, though I do feel the need a add a footnote to this - it probably depends on what you're making.

At the moment I am making the River Stole, which (esp. made in kid silk haze) seems to have the capacity to be frustratingly fiddly without being especially interesting. The pattern repeats are different enought that I can't quite memorize them, but similar enough that I can easily skip from one line of the pattern to the next mid-row not find out until two rows later when the numbers don't add up.

I am also wrestling with the Greek crochet having figured out (more or less) what the names of the stitches are and how to read the diagrams. Stupidly, in an attempt to start with something short, I picked a doilly with relatively few lines of instruction. From the "Greek-reading" point of view this was a good thing. It still took me a fair amount of time with a dictionary to decipher the instructions, hampered considerably by the fact that, like all knitting/crochet patterns it is full of abbreviations and typos (particularly frustrating in an inflected language!).

Anyway, having figured out what I was supposed to do I then set about doing it with the specified 1mm hook and fine white crochet thread. This was mistake number two. It has turned out to be probably the most fiddly pattern I could have selected and definitely designed for making in bright Aegean sunshine rather than in the miserable grey half-light of a British winter. Half the time I can't see where I'm putting the needle, and most of the time that is under my own fingernail! I have managed to produce a sort of screwed up wonky greying thing, which I'm hoping, when washed and blocked to within an inch of its life, will be recognisably crochet. But first I have to finish the incredibly irritating border, and I couldn't face that on the train or after a long day at work, so it will have to wait.

So, by way of something more akin to relaxing meditation I have cast on for a straightforward tank top to use up some Rowanspun a friend gave me. After a degree of consternation over sizing this is coming along ok thank goodness. I'm basing it on the pattern for this Rowan slipover I made last year but without the stripes/fairisle, and in the round, which should make it considerably less of a pain in the neck.
Last time I made the medium, which is supposed to have a 36 inch bust but turned out "roomy" to say the least. Swatching with the yarn and needles I decided on revealed that my version should be 85% the size of the original and I would therefore need to make a larger size this time in order to get something that would fit. I cast on the number of stitches for the size I thought I would need to make in order to get the right measurement and you could have held a small seance in the circle it made. After trying various permutations with fewer and fewer stitches I eventually ended up with the number for the small - a size below the one I made last time. By rights this should have a 28 inch bust given the needles I'm using, but put onto a piece of spare yarn after 10 rows (before the increases) it seems to fit all the way round comfortably at the widest point, so that clearly isn't true. So much for maths! Nothing for it but to carry on and see what happens I guess.

At least it gives me something I can knit in the evenings while watching telly, rather than having only to listen to the dialogue while squinting at tiny stitches, stabbing myself in the palm, and cursing.*

*Mind you, knitting without watching the pictures coupled with our Freeview box's 30 sec. skip function can be quite entertaining. This creates the most fantastic "cut-and-shut" advert slogans such as the slatternly housewife's mantra "Use Detol surface spray..at least twice a year", and my particular favourite "Where does Posh get her amazing fashions? B&Q!"