I’ve reached the point where every row of this shawl feels like an eternity. Especially the purl rows on the wrong side. Good grief they just go on forever. I suspect this is because I now have over 700 stitches on the needles.
There are a few things that can get in the way of doing manic knitting in a deadline. The first would be getting sick, especially when it’s the kind of stupid head cold that saps all your strength and makes you start to doze off in the middle of a row (although the rush of adrenaline you get when your hand jerks from almost falling asleep and you drop a dozen or so stitches can give you just the energy you need to somehow pick them all back up again without losing a single bit of the design, and at least finish the damn row). The second would be adopting a new cat midway through the Olympics – a cat who is very sweet but very nervous so that you end up spending hours of precious knitting time instead sitting on the floor of your library, giving pets and scritches to a tiny little cat because she is so very cute.
And the third, which happened tonight, would be if you look down at the cone and realize that, just as you had begun to fear a few days back, you are going to run out of yarn, and you have 15 more rows left to do.