"The sun did not shine.
It was too wet to play.
So we sat in the house
all that cold, cold wet day."
Dr. Seuss, The Cat in the Hat

These last few days have been of the damp and dreary autumnal sort. (There's promise of sunshine later today, but we'll wait and see....)

"We sat in the house.
We sat there we two,
And we said 'How we wish
We had something to do."

Unlike Sally and the unnamed narrator, I do have something to do. The garter center of the Progressive Shawl is done. I have placed the live stitches on some waste yarn for now (I'll knit an edging onto them after the border is done.)

I'm picking up stitches for the base of the border from those little yo loops. I am pleased and gratified to say that the formula I came up with worked. "How wide do I have to work the center section to end up with 50 loops on each side? Hmmm.....Let's try: (x-1)/2 = y, where x is the number of stitches on the needle and y is the number of loops per side. Eureka!" This works when you start with an odd number of stitches. I haven't attempted it with an even number.



If you try to do this at home, take note. The loops at the corners sort of stretch out and can be hard to see, but they are there. Also, I had to pick up thru the very first loop purlwise so as not to undo the last stitch on the holder thread. All the rest I picked up normally. If I had broken off the working thread between the end of the last knit row and the beginning of the pick ups, I could have done them all normally, but who needs more loose ends to work in?

In the meantime, in- between-time, I've decided the border pattern needs to be a bit wider, so: graph, swatch, mutter, rip, graph, swatch.....