So my friend Karen is, as those who know her are all too aware, kind of prone to medical bad luck. (It's apparently contagious, as her husband is having a rough go of things too.) She always get the weird things, has the weird injuries, goes for the obscure over the usual. Last week, she had the misfortune to break her wrist. (This isn't particularly weird, just bad luck.) She managed to fracture the bone that takes the longest to heal, so she's stuck in a cast for a while. Unfortunately, Karen is also always freezing, so the fact that none of her mittens fit was a cause for concern.

So she's lucky she knows me, isn't she?

She called me last week and asked if I could make a mitten that would go over her cast. I looked at the cast (photos of it are on her blog up there), and since her thumb is cast part way up and therefore immobile, I figured there was no point in giving it a separate thumb. Since the cast covers the rest of her arm, it didn't need to be terrible long, so in the end, what I came up with is essentially an oversized baby mitten. So now Karen will have warm fingers and also won't be able to scratch her face with her super long baby fingernails! So that's a relief.

We went to Calgary last weekend and my friends very tolerantly came to the yarn store with me. (Yay! That's a sign of good friends, when they'll go to the yarn store with you even if they don't knit. Jana is just starting to knit but she's not at the point yet where she gets enthused about yarn store field trips. Give me time!) While we were there, I spotted two baskets of Cascade Fixation, which I immediately realised was perfect. First of all, it's not wool, which Karen is allergic to. (Of course she is.) Secondly, the stretchiness would be great for a cast mitten because we need it to go over the large and inflexible cast but then stay on. So I figured it was perfect.

I sent Karen over to pick out a colour. After rummaging around for a while, she came up with the exact same colourway that I used for her socks. (Broadripples. I am quite impressed that my eye for her taste is so precise!) Conveniently, I had some leftover from them so I didn't need to buy any more. I also bought some DPNs, which I rarely knit with but kind of like for mittens. They're Crystal Palace Bamboo and they are REALLY freaking nice.

Here it is! I finished it earlier this evening while watching Veronica Mars with Jamie. (Incidentally, it's a good thing that show is so good, because it's the only thing that gets Jamie away from World of Warcraft.)




I tried it on, but it looks ridiculous and kind of phallic on me. (My hand is in a fist.)



I'm hoping that it'll work. This is 11 inches around and Karen's cast is 13 inches, so that seems like a good amount of ease for it to stay on fairly snugly. It's quite grippy yarn, and the cast is quite grippy too, so I'm optimistic. I'll hopefully get a picture when I try it on her. It also needs a good name. Castitten? Castmitt? Brokitten? FractureMitt? Splintten? I don't know. I'm open to ideas. (It's too bad nobody would ever need one for more than a few months, because it's an idea that I think could do quite well up here. It sucks to be mittenless in the mornings when it's cold and the sun isn't up yet.)

My other WIPs were slightly neglected so I could finish this quickly, since it's a time sensitive project. (If I'm going to go to the trouble to knit it, I want maximum usage out of it, since it'll become essentially useless once the cast comes off unless someone has a very small and oval shaped head.) However, I'm making some good headway on Rogue



which I continue to love a ridiculous amount. I attached the kangaroo pocket today



so now that isn't flapping around bugging me. The whole thing is getting pretty long!



(For the three of you knitters out there who haven't knit Rogue, it's got a turned hem at the bottom, so that ribbing doesn't actually count towards the length. It is, however, a very nice turned hem if I do say so myself.)

I put the Log Cabin onto two needles yesterday so I could see how the size is coming. It's getting there, but I've got a loooong way to go. I'm not sure what the best strategy for this is going to be. We'll see how it goes. I figure I'm about a quarter of the way to where I'd like it to be.



And here's my sock pal's sock, all snuggled up with his friend Rogue! Aw. Isn't that sweet? Clearly they've resolved their differences. Although I wouldn't be surprised if I came out tomorrow morning to find a pile of frogged yarn and a Rogue trying to look innocent. Maybe one of them better sleep in the knitting basket.



It's going slowly but surely and looks great. I estimate needing another six stripes before I split for the heel flap.

Busy busy! It's a good thing I had a good knitting day, because although most of my day was actually kind of pleasant, I had an embarrassing and painful incident earlier. Erin and I were at the mall after our delightful evening of wedding dress shopping (it's fun going with someone who's the sample size, because she can try anything!) and having dinner, and I fell off my shoe.

Yeah. You read that right. Fell off my shoe. You see, I wear clogs, because they have excellent support and make my ankle not hurt (in fact, after two years in clogs almost exclusively, I no longer have pain in my Achilles Tendon! This is a major life improvement). Unfortunately, the nature of clogs is that they're highly inflexible and quite tall. So this evening, I lost my balance and my ankle turned in my shoe. This is not the first time it's happened - I quite often sort of tip over off my shoe. (This makes me sound like the least coordinated person ever. Which I'm not, I swear.) But today was the first time that this caused me to totally bite it.

I pretty much collapsed on the mall floor, which caused some alarm to Erin (who didn't see what happened until I was inexplicably on the floor) and the nice person in the store we were walking past. It took me a minute to collect myself - my leg essentially buckled under me and my other leg crashed into my foot and the very hard shoe while I hit the ground with my leg and elbow, which was a barrel of laughs - but nothing was broken and I picked myself up. Erin very nicely didn't laugh at me at all and was quite concerned. I was mostly feeling kind of dumb.

But now my stupid leg REALLY hurts. The leg that didn't collapse is actually the one that's really hurting - I think it hit the floor first. I've been icing it and stuff, but it hurts like hell. And now the ankle that turned itself is really starting to throb, so both legs are sore and stiff, and I'm going to be hobbling around having to explain that I fell off my shoe.

Great. Quick, somebody invent me a good story for what I did.

Labels: Cast mitten, Fell off my shoe, Log Cabin, Rogue, Sock Pal