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Fakepotis in Fresno

I’m driving back from a long weekend in Fresno (my glorious place of birth) and I’m knitting a fakepotis.

I should clarify. Corey’s doing the driving. I’m sitting here with some mystery yarn and needles my mom found in the garage. I had completely failed to bring any knitting with me on this trip, so I decided to try and do something with the stuff. It’s a great alternative to staring blankly at this for 3 hours:

I’d say a good 75% of this drive is flat farmland. It can be mind-numbing. As much as I dislike the monotony of this drive, Corey’s loathing for it outshines us all. It’s Corey’s second-least-favorite activity. (I’m guessing dental work is #1, but I can’t confirm ’cause he’s currently inside the gas station picking up something. Probably Valium or Xanax so he can get through the rest of this drive with his sanity intact. They sell those at gas stations these days, right?)

So anyway, I had to figure out something to do with this yarn. I only have one skein, and it’s either really nice silk or cheapo acrylic. It could go either way. I plan on burning a length of it to see what it’s made of, but I decided lighting something on fire while Corey drives might be considered rude, so I have to wait a bit.

So, what to do? Baby stuff seemed inappropriate since I didn’t know the origin of the yarn, or, frankly, how many garage-dwelling animals had used it as bedding in the past 10 years. Really, a finished-object wasn’t even the point—I just needed something to do.

That’s when I remembered Kate Gilbert’s Clapotis. For years I’ve flirted with the idea of making one, and I think I’ve read through the pattern 100 times by now. Obviously, I couldn’t make the full shawl with one skein, but I could make a little narrow version. Why not?

This is when I remembered that 3G service is terrible out here. I tried to search for Clapotis instructions on my iphone but my browser kept timing out. So I had to go it alone. I thought I remembered the basic concept of the thing. Basically, you knit on the bias, and then drop stitches every so often.

At first it looked pretty bad:

I actually almost frogged at that point cause it looked so pathetic. But what else was I going to do, look at this view some more?

Meh. Might as well keep going. By the time we got to Delano, I had this:

Whaddya know, that thing is looking half decent! Not bad for abandoned garage yarn.

Well, I better publish this before I go up the Grapevine and lose service again. I hope you all had a nice Memorial Day weekend!

Look! Oil pumps! That must mean we’re almost home. Los Angeles, here we come!

Categorized in: Musings