scifiknitter

I continue to knit nearly every day. These days I think of my knitting as my legacy in stitches. Legacies. What will persist beyond our lives? This is something that surely other people think about when they realize that the end of their lives may be nearing. When I think of my life and my work, I realize that my knitting is the work that might endure the longest. My accounting work? The general ledgers of each year I closed will live on as PDF files on a server in Ithaca, but with a document retention schedule of 6 years for nearly everything else, almost every piece of paper I carefully filed away during 13 years of work will be shredded within five years time. I did leave the organization in a healthy financial position so it is more likely endure for many years, and there is a plaque on the wall of a kitchen memorializing my name and my work. I cannot take credit either for the work that the agency continues to do or for its continued operation. My knitting will surviv...

I use Ravelry.com to keep track of my knitting projects. Each project has a series of pages, with information about the yarn used, the needle size, photos, rating of difficulty, and comments. You also can record the date you start and the date you finish a project. That is how I know that I started this shawl on July 2, 2009 and finished it on March 18, 2010. That’s 37 weeks, exactly - I started and ended on a Thursday. That’s a long time for me to have one project on the needles. I already knew that knitting means math. Awareness of math can certainly help you look ahead in a project, and know what is coming. The end of this project drove that point home. I started with 6 stitches. Due to the inexorable growth that results from adding 6 stitches every other row in the body of the shawl and 178 stitches every other row in the ruffled edge, I ended up with 2,497 stitches, give or take a few. This is what it looks like to work on a project that has a couple of thousand stitches or so. ​ ...