Toronto today is downright depressing. It is grey and raining and cold and the snow has all turned grey with the city dirt. The grey ground is poking through, and the grey sky looks down on it all. It’s the sort of day where you have to turn on all the lights in the house to try and tone down the grey.

I hate it. I hate it more than I can tell you. It knocks the will to…well, knit grey mittens right out of you. You can’t buck a system this big, so I’m not. Let’s just forget the mittens for a day or two…ok? I’m going to the mirror where I will practice staring directly and blankly ahead while saying (with every ounce of conviction I can muster…) “What mittens?” I thank you in advance for joining me in this exercise.

Considering how grey everything is, the very not grey Clapotis saw a little tiny bit of action last night. Amy, Laurie and (naturally) Rams had all suggested to me that I might want to carefully consider the addition of a border to the aforementioned scarf/wrap/ thingie.

Laurie wondered what would happen when the running stitches hit the “non-standard” border, and Amy mused about me confining that which should not be confined, since she worries that the border will hold in those stitches that are meant to expand. Rams, well. Rams just likes to make trouble. We will ignore her concerns.

Me, I laugh in the face of knitting danger. I giggle at planning. I mock concerns for my sanity, nerves and Clapotis. I do as I please and I care nothing for the overcautious concerns of the undaring. I fearlessly…well, I checked.

Seems ok, doesn’t it? We can dismiss Laurie’s concern out of hand. Each running stitch starts with a yarn over, so the stitch can’t run any lower than that, since the stitch doesn’t exist before that. It runs it’s merry little bourgeois French way straight down to my “non-standard” border, where it stops. No problem. To address Amy’s concern (which frankly worried me a little more, since if she is right I will have managed to knit a very large scarf surrounded by a very small border…which would have a rather vague er.. parachute-like effect.) I dropped a couple of the stitches and gave it a rather light blocking. (Yes. Right on the needles.) That seems ok too. Now, I suppose the possibility exists that there is a little, tiny bit of a chance that the border, while it can cope with two dropped stitches, will be singing a different song when there are many more, but for now I’m pacified. Those of you paying close attention to the “non-standard” knitting of Clapotis will notice that the stitches I’m intending to drop are purled. This saves me marking them with stitch markers and since dropped purl stitches look the same as dropped knit stitches it seemed like an easy way of keeping track of the intended victims. Note that I have used the words “fine”, “ok” and “easy” to describe this knitting project. If you have been reading for a while then you know that the chances that it will be “fine”, “ok” and “easy” have been reduced to about, oh….ZERO by me saying this out loud. In fact, it would probably surprise no one, (least of all, Rams) if this scarf/wrap thingie burst spontaneously into flames sometime mid afternoon, and was thusly reduced to (of course) GREY ash.

A big virtual smooch goes out to my buddies Ann and Kay, who brightened my day yesterday when I got an extremely cool “yarn bomb” in the mail. (This is proof that wrapping is everything, and why each and every time that I am tempted to simply drop something into a gift bag because I can’t find the time to get fancy uplifting tissue paper and wrap my gift it in a creative way I should take the time to ask myself “What would Ann and Kay do?”) The beautiful ball of greeny-blue Mountain Colors “Mountain Goat” was immediately ripped from its tissue paper chrysalis and cast on to be “The flower basket shawl” from Interweave Knits.

I originally thought this pattern was dumbass. I was wrong. It is cheery, charming, interesting (takes very little yarn) and is absolutely not grey.

For those of you wondering if I can bring myself to spin for Joe’s Giant Grey Gansey today?

I think you can answer that yourselves.