KTS: zoom / by Katherine Hajer

Today I had yet another dental appointment (the last for two whole weeks), so I got some TTC knitting in, plus some more in the waiting room at the dentist's office. It's got to the point where the receptionist just says, "You've got your knitting, right?" instead of, "Help yourself to the magazines."

This is what the double-knitted jacket looked like first thing this morning while I was waiting for my work computer to boot and log into VPN:


To orient everyone: the right-hand side is the part I'm currently working on. You can see the two straight needles I'm knitting with right now on the right, plus the points of the circular needle that I knitted with until this point. Its current job is to hold the stitches for the back and the other front until I'm ready to knit them.

It took a while to get used to double knitting on straight needles, but I think I've finally got the hang of it. Today I got about ten rows done on just this one front, which is about the equivalent of 2.5 of the main body rows, and in a lot less time. I thought having to look at the chart after only one repeat instead of after every four would have slowed me down, but it doesn't seem to have.

The other good news is that now that I've made it this far, the chart starts getting simpler, because I'm reaching the very top of the tree. There's one more pair of spirals, then a bird and a sort of heart shape, and then the tree ends and there's four more birds and the neck/shoulder shaping.

In fact, I think it's just as well that I'm only doing one repeat (and a mirror image, at that) of the chart, because the tree got pretty complex for a while:


Each row in itself wasn't too bad, but I know just before the hygienist said it was time for my Marathon Man-style torture cleaning and disinfecting, I looked at the pattern that had been rendered so far and felt surprised that the geometry had built up so much.

Onwards.