Both Ends Are In the Deep Purple Now

I’ve had my reader’s shrug at my computer desk where I can work on it while catching up with the blogs, webcomics and YouTube channels I follow.

I’ve also been knitting on it while I’ve been working on this story idea.  I thought I knew what the story was about and where it was going, but when I was deciding on character names and identities, setting scenes and doing a little world-building, I decided to incorporate a little back story on two of the three main characters just as a kind of set-up for the main story for when I bring the third main character in, and the durn thing bolted, got the bit between its teeth and took off in a totally unexpected direction for 9 whole chapters!  It’s an interesting direction, though, and I’ve decided to give the story its head just to see where it ends up.

I should know by now.  I’ll get a set of characters and put them in a situation, thinking I know who they are and what they’ll do, and then the characters start telling me stuff I didn’t know about them that changes how I see them, or they insist they would never do the stuff I’m trying to get them to do, and the next thing I know, the inmates are trying to take over the asylum.  I have found that knitting keeps the motor part of my brain out of the way while the business end is trying to get the madhouse back under control.  Wrestling with the angel, indeed.

And speaking of knitting, I’ve been making quite a bit of progress on my reader’s shrug.   But, because it’s technically “TV knitting,” every now and again, I have to stop and do the “two steps forward and one step back” dance because I’ve made an oops.

Here, I discovered that instead of the 9 stitches I was supposed to have on the ribbed border, I had lost a stitch at some point and only had 8, so I had to frog just that bit row by row until I found out what I’d done with it.  Took me over an hour to locate my little uh-oh and repair it.  All better now, though.

The color change on the yarn is interesting — pink gradates into a fuchsia that gradates through a kind of maroon purple to just plain purple, and then pushes on through to a kind of cyan blue, a really greenish turquoise (which I edited out) and back to pink.

I’m mystified as to how somebody came up with the name of “Troll” for this set of colors. (What were they smoking?) (And where can I get some!)

Anyway, I did some more research on the construction of shrugs and realized a key measurement was wrong because I had not measured me in the right places.  Pas de problème.  I remeasured me and got the correct dimension of 24 inches wide before I start the sleeves.  (Instead of running the tape measure from the point of one shoulder across my back to the point of the other one, which gave me 18 inches, I should have run the tape measure from the edge of one armpit around the back of my neck to the edge of the other armpit, and got the more useful measurement of 24 inches.)

Anyway, I’ve gotten 12 inches from the center point to one end, and I’ve got about 4 inches to go to have 12 inches on the other end.  I’m further along now than I was when the above picture was taken.  Both ends are in the deep purple now.  When it measures 24 inches from one 32-inch circular needle to the other, that’s when it all goes onto the 60-inch circular needle and we start two-at-a-timeing the sleeves.  Oh, what fun.

However, it’s sneaking up on 1 a.m. just at the moment, and I think I hear my beddy boo calling me. . . Hasta banana.