Around and Around

I had a little dizzy spell last week, and it made me realize that my whole world was going around in circles.

Of course, as a spinner, I'm pretty used to things that go around and around. I find the whirl of spokes and whorls soothing. And I've been watching those soothing discs spin quite a bit lately, between filling in gaps in workshop samples and working on yarns for the ongoing shawl series. So circles are my friends.

Then I noticed that my knitting was all going in circles. The Fire Shawl is a variation of EZ's Pi Shawl, knitted in concentric rounds, increasing stitches as the circumference increases (or vice versa), from 36 to 72 to 144 to 288 to 576. Around and around in circles, until it looks like this:

The shawl is a little smaller than I had hoped, but, apparently almost a mile of yarn doesn't go as far as it seems it should when you are knitting around and around. There is yarn left over, but not enough of any of the colors to do another set of rounds. I'm still pretty happy with the effect, though.

The sexy close-up, showing all the different yarns.

I am planning to knit a pair of stripey gloves with the leftovers. More knitting in circles.

I'm not entirely certain how one actually wears a circular shawl, but I appear to be thinking about it.

When I was resting from the around and around of the Fire Shawl, I was working on the around and around of a linen doily. I will be presenting a workshop on flax at the ANWG conference in a couple of weeks, and I'm feeling utterly under-prepared, so I'm adding samples and examples on a daily basis. Thus a red linen doily. I did not have enough yarn spun to do the full pattern, but I did crochet around and around for 10 rounds. (No pic yet--it's just having it's blocking bath.)

Of course, there is a sock going around and around on dpns, as well. Paton's Kroy in a rather interesting self-striping pattern.

Then there is the garden cycle, which began again last week.

The little heads of baby rhubarb and the first new strawberry leaves have started to peek out. This means that the digging and planting and tending has begun. It's getting harder to kneel with my bad knee, but I am plugging away in small chunks. Our growing season is notoriously short up here in the North, so I'm getting as much started as early as I can, though the bulk of the work will have to wait until June, when I get home from the teaching tour.

Which brings me to another circle. I was originally scheduled to go to Olds for the HWSDA conference, then to Spokane for ANWG, pretty much a straight up and down trip. But now I have added Greensboro, North Carolina to the trip, which means travelling almost all the way across the US, then back to Canada. In a big circle.

No wonder I get dizzy!

So, just to keep myself on the straight and narrow, I cast on a scarf last night. That should do it!

(You'll notice, however, that I am knitting with circular needles!)