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No Dinner Tonight at my Table

It is a rainy day here in Minneapolis.  The last few days have been warm, up to 90 F, approximately 30 C on Tuesday.  Plus the humidity has been relatively low with a nice breeze.  Last night as I enjoyed a concert across the street the breeze was delightfully cooling.

Knowing it would be an inside-day today, I purposefully worked to finish the Dummy Clap shawl last night.  And contrary to my custom of missing self-imposed knitting deadlines, this one was hit.  I even had time to tuck in all the tails.  It was so satisfying, but the most satisfying was dropping all those stitches.  There are 12 columns on my Dummy Clap each with approximately 3,425 stitches.  That means I got to drop over 41,000 stitches on purpose.  If you knit, you can imagine how much fun that is.  The first couple of columns were dropped individually, then I decided to do two at a time and finally three.  It seems as if my middle finger could do the most damage in dropping stitches with my index a close second.  My poor ring finger was a distant third.  It only took 15 minutes to drop 68.5 inches/174 cm in length 12 times.  BTW the shawl/scarf is 68.5 inches X 16.5 inches or 174 cm X 42 cm making it a perfect size to work as either a scarf or shaw.

Enough about that here's a couple of looks at my Dummy Clap drying after its quick bath this morning.

A close up so you can see what dropping one stitch can do

My table full of  Dummy Clap

This is a cotton/rayon blend with bamboo and acrylic threads so it will take some time to dry. But it will be lovely when it is unpinned. BTW, the light tan towel does have lines on it making straight pinning a lot less difficult to do.


Even I can get straight lines with this type of help

So no dinner tonight at my dining room table, it is too full of knitting to accommodate plates and such.

On to another matter, I have lived without a swift for too long.  A swift is a tool used to hold a hank of yarn so it can be more easily wound into a ball or cake because the swift spins.  Sure a hank can be put over the back of a chair, but the rocking back and forth motion can be tedious, especially if one is working with several hanks at a time.  So lately I have been doing some investigating and decided the type of swift shown below would take up too much space and wouldn't travel well.


Yes, the arms will collapse, but it is still big and many models do not stay clamped to the edge of a table very well.


So I purchased this instead:

A ChiaoGoo Wooden Yarn Swift
Take it out of this rather modest box and you get this:



I have taken it for a test spin and am convinced it will stay on a table while it spins and I love the convenience of being able to put it away completely in a closet when it is not in use.  Not to mention when I want to take it back to Vancouver it will cleverly fit into my carry-on suitcase.  I expect this to be a good investment.


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