I took the train to Seattle for the weekend. One of the Piano Babes is moving to Shanghai for two years, and we wanted to have a reunion before she departs. The Piano Babes have been friends since 2000, when we met at Sonata, a piano camp for adults. We live up and down the West Coast, and Seattle was a good meeting place.
I had *a lot* of time to knit on the train on Friday. We were delayed for five hours because a freight train further north hit a person who chose to commit suicide by train. She must have been a very disturbed person. So sad. But it completely discombobulated north-south train traffic for the whole day.
I finished the second sleeve of the February Baby Sweater while we were delayed. As soon as I finished it, I realized that I had made a grievous error and knit it out of the stitches for the back. During one phone conversation with The Husband, he asked if the baby had already been born.
“Yes, I’m taking dinner to the family on Tuesday.”
“Well, does she have an arm in the middle of her back?”
Such a card, he is.
But I had plenty of time to rip out the sleeve, and re-knit it. And work a good deal of the body after that. I finished the knitting on the train home, which arrived 15 minutes early. I’ll post pictures tomorrow after I have some daylight to take them!
In the meantime, here are some thoughts on this pattern: This was like that quiz in high school, where there’s a full sheet of instructions. The first instruction tells you to read the whole page first, and you never do. The last instruction is to put your name on the top of the page, ignore the rest of the instructions, and turn in the quiz. The pattern didn’t say to read the whole thing through first, but I should have! I read far enough to know that I had to pay attention to starting the buttonholes, which aren’t mentioned until well into the pattern, long after the first one should have been made. But I didn’t go to the end. The sleeves are made and bound off before working the body. At the end of the body, it says to bind off purlwise, which looks great. But I had already bound off the sleeves knitwise. Since purlwise looked better, I went back and tinked the bind off on the sleeves and reknit (repurled? or just purled, because I hadn’t purled them before) them. I could have left them, but I can’t stand to have things not match. I’ve made this sweater before, about 10 years ago, so I didn’t really remember much about it, other than I liked it. I think I’ll leave myself notes in my book this time!
Some pictures from Seattle:
We spent some time at Pike Street Market on Saturday. It was really busy because it was the weekend, and a beautiful day. There were lots of street musicians, but this one was my favorite, just for sheer novelty value. He’s playing the harmonica, and the guitar, balancing another guitar on his chin? forehead? and managing two hula hoops.
We bought some sea scallops here for dinner. They were delicious, seared on the grill. We also had fresh heirloom tomatoes and basil in a caprese salad, and sauteed green and purple beans and peppers.
These looked great, too, but I’ve developed an allergy to crab, so it’s an unrequited longing…
The flowers at the market are gorgeous, and I had to buy some. When we met up with the rest of the Babes, I found that I wasn’t the only one who had succumbed.
This cruise ship was in port. Quite a contrast with the cruise I was on last week!
We even played some piano this weekend, and some Rock Band, too. I played this Adagio by Franz Joseph Haydn (Sonata No. 48, Hob. XVI/35) among other things. I recorded this a few weeks ago for the Adult Beginner Forum’s quarterly online recital on PianoWorld.com. The recital went live while I was on vacation; I thought it was amusing to be in a piano recital when I was nowhere near a piano!
