I had been going along nicely on my Maluka shawl.  In fact, going along so nicely that I bound off yesterday.  It looked like this:

….which, you may not be able to tell, but that is pretty small.  The border is very stretchy but the inside and top are not, and therefore it is not very wide at all.  I read many, many, many Ravelry comments (there are over 1400 projects on Ravelry for this shawl) and many of the many said that it was small so they did a modification with wraps and turns, rather than the ssk/p2tog thing that was in the pattern, to make the shawl wider.  But, I don’t love doing wraps and turns and picking up the wraps, and couldn’t understand why the pattern instructions would make it small, and since I put three more repeats on the border, mine certainly would come out ok, right? So I knit by the patterns instructions.  Wrong.  So….. click down there:

Ripping Out

It took mere seconds.  Seriously, less than a minute, to unwind a few hours of knitting.  I’d like to think I simply “took one for the team” as a way of verifying for the students in my class for this shawl, that the pattern instructions are not ideal and the many, many, many Ravelry comments I chose to ignore were, in fact, right and it might be a good idea to give them a little more credit next time.

I am now back to here:

…ready and totally excited to do some wraps and turns.  Stay tuned for the second, and final, result.  Ok, and by the way?  Isn’t that a totally ingenious way of ripping out and getting a nice, neat ball of yarn to re-knit from?

Meanwhile, back at the yarn shop, I finished teaching the Pieces of Eight Mitts class, which had to be cancelled because of the tornado weather around here last week.  Here are the almost-done mitts from the students in class:

And my finished pair:

So cool.  But if I knit these again, I would use a striping yarn with long colorways to get a more dramatic looking figure 8.

Around the house, this is happening:

Digging up cement foundation pieces and hiding them in the woods waaaaaaaay in the back of our property somewhere.

And this:

…minus the broccoli which is still in the box with the flowers that are waiting to be planted because, for some reason, I mistook green things with no flowers to be flowers.  Currently, there are regular tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, eggplant, peppers and onions.

And this red-winged black bird who is wreaking havoc, chasing all the other birds around:

And this frog that was sitting there:

And this turtle digging a hole right there in the middle of the yard and we’re wondering if it will lay eggs:

Coming up…. I’m excited about a day-long knitting class that I’m teaching which includes lunch that I am making this Sunday.  2 socks in 1:

…. so stay tuned for all the details!