I finished knitting up all of the pieces of Rose Friday night, and expected that I wouldn’t have much of a chance to assemble and block the sweater because this was to be the weekend of major grouting on the kitchen floor, about 75 percent of which is laid, with the rest waiting for us to break down and live without a refrigerator for a few days.  It’s been raining like mad for the last week or so here in Vir-ginny, and our kitchen floor is right on top of the concrete slab that is our foundation.  And concrete is subject to hydrostatic pressure–so much so that there is standing water in our floor register pathway thingies.  I blame my Mother the Water-Witch, who leaves floods in her wake.  Anyway, the mastic won’t dry.  As in, if I try to move a tile a smidge, it slides a centimeter.  Whoops.  So I couldn’t grout Saturday morning.  Will I act as if that made me sad?  No.  No I will not.  Grouting is a horrible pain in the knees.   But having my dining room furniture in every room except the dining room is starting to make my skin crawl. 

To forestall a complete Crazy-Lanea-chaos-phobia meltdown, we ran some errands Saturday morning when I should have been grouting, and came home to find that grouting would be further delayed.  I thought I should do something at least moderately chore-like before working on the sweater, so as to appease the Gods of Grout-Delaying* and simultaneously convince myself that the house wasn’t in a total state of disarray.  So I re-potted most of my orchids, many of whom were trying to climb out of their pots and strangle me in my sleep.  I think.  Or they just wanted new potting medium.

There they sit, post re-pot, with their south-facing view on their antique hog-butchering table**.  I will spend the next few days begging them to like their new digs and maniacally checking to make sure they show no signs of stress.  I accidentally killed an orchid a couple of weeks ago by leaving it out in the sun in a tin cache pot.  I was distracted by the tiling and didn’t think of the possible consequences.  Yes, I know it’s no excuse.  I don’t want the others to turn on me.  And, of course, the victim was an orchid a friend gave me because she couldn’t care for it properly, as most of them are, so it makes the horror even greater.   

By the end of that project, it seemed like lunchtime.  So I rested a bit, and flopped onto the couch to decide what to eat.   And I found that Godfather II was on TV.  Sweeeeet.  That, my friends, was a sign. A sign to eat leftover lasagna, drink some fine Virginia wine with lunch, and begin to assemble Rose.  Godfather II is a wonderful movie for knitting, because I’ve seen it so many times, I love every minute of it, and it’s a wonderful balance between stuff I’m happy to watch if my hands get tired or I need a break, and stuff that I have memorized and am content to just listen to. 

Kayo patiently waited to help do the dishes, and Scath, prince among cats, offered to help with the sewing-up:

Would you like some help?  I know this is your first sweater, and I know a thing or two about a thing or two, you know?

See, you need to ease the cap sleeves in–it won’t be too hard if you baste everything in place, and if you think of a sweater much the same way as you would think of a boot you were assembling.  Remember how I showed you to tack an arc in place and then work your ease in by sewing by turns with two separate needles towards the curve?  The same will work here. 

Woooo, teaching makes me tired.  Come back in an hour and we can finish.

Post-script.  Holy crap for crap, Rose is really low cut.  Really. Low. Cut.  May be adding more than one round of crochet to finish off that neckline. 

*What–there could be Gods of Grout-delaying.  Shaaaadup.
** Crazy Lanea is not terrible put off by the macabre, in case you haven’t heard.

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