No subtitles: we're knitting

I am occasionally known to take up needles and knit. More than half of the time I manage to turn out something that someone can say, "Oh, thank you!" about with a straight face. For the other projects I learn a lot about un-knitting.

Last winter my office was in the downstairs part of the house, an area which the builders obviously worked on during the summer as they paid no regard to the need those rooms might have for HEAT in certain months. So I knut myself a pair of fingerless gloves to keep my hands warmer while typing away on the keyboard. They work beautifully! I am tempted to open an Etsy shop.

Having knitting underway almost always makes me think of plot points or bits of dialog for the current play that I really need to write down before I forget them. This is generally when I am making my first pass through some subtlety in the pattern (Row 5: K5, M1R, K21, M1L, K5) and my hands are cat's-cradled together. If I had needles that incorporated a roller-ball pen at the blunt end I would be better off.

I am rather fond of cable knitting, and that often involves a pattern that repeats over as much as 20 rows. I keep track of what row I am on with a little stack of coins--get to the end of the row, move a coin from the left stack to the right stack. Inevitably, some need will come up (the fish man at the door with fresh-caught haddock) and one or both of the piles of coins get scooped up to be counted out in payment. I then have to try to figure out where I was in the pattern: this is what gives my cable-knit sweaters their distinctive, if somewhat unsettling, visual quality.

Knitting also affects my cultural development. I am nowhere near as good as my mother was: she could clack away on the needles without hardly looking at them. (When she got to the end of a row, if she felt like it she would knit the next row backwards--that is, without changing which needle is in which hand. If you don't appreciate how cool that is, you need to get some knitting needles.) I, on the other hand, need to inspect every stitch with some suspicion and dread. Is that a purl stitch? Is that supposed to be a purl stitch? This means that, if we are watching a movie, it had better not be a movie that relies on sight gags or subtitles.

I miss a lot of punch lines, but at least I am less likely to incorporate the sweater I am wearing into the one I am knitting. Where have all the radio plays gone?