Abusing myself = no knitting.

Once again, a busy weekend with very little knitting. How on earth am I going to get these gifts done?

On Saturday I did actually get something done on the headband while in the car on the way to Costco. Living in backwoods Japan means that a few of what I consider the staples of Western food are missing. Cheese, for instance, and proper hot dogs or pasta sauce. One can technically buy both of those things at any old grocery store in Yatsushiro, but they taste nothing like what I think they should taste like. The cheese is that plastic-y sandwich slice stuff (but not as good), the hot dogs all taste like frozen breakfast sausages (as if nobody ever realized that meats with the same shape might have different tastes), and the pasta sauce seems to all be missing important ingredients such as garlic, basil, and oregano. Enter Costco, which is just like the Costco at home except it carries futons instead of beds, has entirely too much J-pop in the music section, and has gigantic raw prawns with their heads and legs attached in the seafood section. It has plenty of proper cheese, hot dogs, and pasta sauce, although this time around they didn't have the mega-sized Prego I bought last time, so I had to settle for something that cost more yen for less sauce, and isn't even as good. In any case, it takes about two hours to get there, and I can't drive (no car, expired int'l license), so I got a fair amount of Sheila's headband done in the car, and I only got a little teasing for it. There were a few moments when Elissa's driving gave me visions of stabbing myself through the eyeball with the needles, but it was fine.

As for the headband itself, I'm just not sure. It's a very nice pattern, and I have finally gotten the hang of it, but my tension is clearly off. I've been following the chart, and the whole thing is a somewhat complicated set of knits, purls, slips, yarn overs, k2ts, ssks, etc., all one right after the other. It makes for a cool headband, by there seems to be a vast difference between the tension of my knit stitches and my purl stitches, usually not so obvious in stockinette or regular cabling where there is enough space for things to work themselves out in between pattern changes. But this pattern has me switching things up every two or three stitches, or less, so the whole thing looks sloppy as hell. This is the first time I've ever done ssk, too, and now I finally understand it. I've seen it in patterns before without knowing what it meant, and I kept wondering how just slipping something is supposed to decrease anything. I looked it up in my trusty Knitting Answer Book, though, and a small dim lightbulb went off. Duh. But it turns out that I was still screwing things up for a while, anyway - the pattern calls for alternating a yarn over, k2t with a ssk, yarn over on every right side row, so that you get a pattern of alternating holes, like this:

X X O X
X O X X
X X O X
X O X X

I'd show you an actual picture, but I haven't taken one yet. The only reason I have the one above is that I hurriedly snapped one this morning before I came to work, knowing it was the only time I'd get a chance to blog for the next undeterminate number of days. You can see that the lighting is all wacked out, because the blue pillow is purple and the lilac headband looks pink (the sun was barely over the mountains and the light was lovely and orange and turned my colors weird).

Anyway (geez, distracted much?), this means that you have to wrap the yarn one way on one row (because you will be knitting next) and the other way on the other row (because you will be purling next). Then on the wrong side row, you're supposed to be purling the y/o stitches, except I was purling wrong on one kind of y/o, so my holes didn't appear on that row, giving me this for the first few inches of the piece:

X X O X
X X X X
X X O X
X X X X

Because I am a dolt. I figured it out and started doing it the correct way, then decided that no one would notice the messed up part because there's more of a pattern to the whole thing anyway, as you'll see when I can post proper (that word keeps coming up today) pictures. THEN I managed to do this a few inches later:

X O X X
X X O X
X X O X
X X O X
X O X X

And that I could not handle. I had finally gotten the hang of the pattern, wasn't looking at the chart, and guess what else I was doing? Watching a movie, of course. Friday night Katie and I watched Atonement (such a great movie, one of the best book adaptations I've ever seen) and Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium (goofy but entertaining), and so naturally I screwed up my knitting. Spent the first part of the car knitting on ripping back to that and fixing it. Then I had left the key to the chart at home so wasn't sure how to start the decreases and had to stop, and the whole damn trip took about four hours longer than it needed to because we had to go into the city and that was clearly a mistake.

Now I'm almost done, already started the decreases and everything. I'd like to finish tonight, but I can't promise that because I will be here at school late again with the final practice for the prefectural English recitation concert (thank god! I can't take any more "Iz zat ze Maori lawnguage?" "or "My name is Janet Blaun" [should be Brown] - I love these kids dearly, but I seriously can't take it anymore), and then I should really get to the gym. Yeah, suck. But I did the 3,333 steps (why, you ask? what an excellent question. I don't know) on Sunday, an all-day, completely exhausting excursion that is the other reason I didn't knit more this weekend, and my legs are still so incredibly stiff that getting down my extremely steep stairs first thing in the morning is torture. But hey! I climbed a mountain completely via staircase. In November. When I haven't worked out in oh, forever. Dolt.

Robin's Fetching is still sitting thumbless in a corner, but I bought the yarn for Aashima's Fetching and Reidy's Diamond and Smocked blanket, I think. I'm not sure about the yarn for the blanket - I got ten skeins for ¥500, and it's 100% acrylic, not even in the Ravelry database. Clearly not high-quality stuff, but she has said that this blanket is for her cats. And she wants either bright royal blue or sour apple green (to match her living room, apparently - !!!), and this yarn fits the blue bill. Still, I think she deserves something nicer, so the jury is still out. Maybe I'll do the acrylic blanket for the kitties in a different pattern, and do the Diamond and Smocked in something nicer. Yeah, in all my spare time. Of which I used to have plenty, as I recall, before the Winter Term ALT Busywork kicked in. Sigh.