It's My Move

Great success in my Olympic knitting: I finished off my chessboard last Thursday (needs washing and blocking though) and, squeaking in just under the wire early yesterday, the last of my dozen dishcloths.

Up next, I'm going to start knitting a model of one of the kings, using larger yarn and needles than what I actually plan to use for the finished sculpture. While the vast overwhelming majority of the models I make are smaller than what the finished item is, I think I'm better off building big to ensure I get this right the first time.

For starters, it's infinitely easier to pick up stitches when I rip something out, as I can almost guarantee I will do on this phase.

Repeatedly, I'm sure. (Although I would love to be proven wrong!)

As always, excessive details can be found on the My Past Life blog.

At least now, I'm working to my own schedule, not someone else's. That being said, tying myself to the sports extravaganza certainly provided me with motivation, much as spinning in the Tour de Fleece provided sufficient impetus to get the spinning done.

I've been debating whether or not I want to talk about the politics of the Olympics: perhaps even just typing that line will get me banned in China, depending on how sophisticated their parsing programme is. Personally, I couldn't not watch our athletes, as one of my first Olympic memories as a kid was watching our equestrian show-jumping team take Canada's only gold medal in Mexico City in 1968.

But I know several people who chose not to watch simply because the games were in China, as if watching somehow condoned the human rights abuses, censorship, and almost frightening spectre of organization to the point of compulsiveness on threat of death.

I prefer to look at it from the same perspective many of us have about being in Afghanistan: support our personnel (be they troops or athletes) without necessarily supporting the reason they are where they are.

A quintessentially Canadian solution, I fear....