One of my lovely assistants is shown here modeling Glampyre's One Skein Wonder. I modified the pattern to fit her and knit it up in a maroon yarn called Touch Me and some Manos del Uruguay wool in the color Butane. It came out perfect. I had very little to do with that. Pattern adjustments mean math and math and I don't usually mix in the context of relaxing hobbies. Not only was I downsizing the pattern, but these yarns knit up at a bulkier gauge than the pattern called for. Instead of grabbing my calculator, I cast on and eye balled the work as I went. If my intuition told me to stop the increases and move on to the edge stitches then that's what I did. Lo and behold it all worked out just right, which is well and fitting since it was a gift for this particular lovely assistant.
Since the day she was born she has had an inner focus that locks onto an objective and never looks back. There's no contemplating the pros and cons, no questioning her own abilities. Just a laser beam straight ahead. As a toddler we would take her to the beach and she would run straight for the water, as high as she could go before we snatched her back to the safety of our sandy blanket. Never mind that she couldn't swim, she just wanted to be there in the waves and I would be franticly pulling her back over and over. In retrospect, if I had let her go, she would have just set about the business of successfully growing fins.
Now she wants to dance. It's all she thinks about. All she does in her free time when she thinks no one's looking. She fell in love with the movie The Secret of Roan Inish and the music captivated her. She began to speak to us with an Irish accent. We brought her to our local pub where a friend was playing his fiddle and she was so thrilled. "It's Roan Inish music!" she said. And then some girls got up to dance and the rhythm of the song was the rhythm of their feet and she dove in.
I made the One Skein Wonder so she would have something special to wear on a special night. For her birthday we surprised her with tickets to Riverdance. She wasn't told where we were going until we arrived at the Theater and she saw the poster. "It's Roan Inish Dancing." she whispered. Beyond ecstatic, she danced in the lobby waiting for the show to start, she sat on the edge of her seat from curtain up to curtain down.
Since the producers of Riverdance failed to notice her remarkable talent as she danced through the lobby, she realized she might have to pay some dues and began dance classes today. The parents aren't allowed to watch class, but my husband later confessed that he peeked in. "All they were doing was hopping around in a line with one leg out." he said. Now I have to confess, I have a nasty trait that I've passed on to the majority of my children. If I can't do something really fantastic from the get go, I lose steam fairly quickly. I remember being in awe of figure skaters as a child until my parents actually signed me up for lessons. I spent class after class just skating in circles, holding on to the waist of the girl in front of me like some conga line in purgatory, thinking, "Hey! When do I get to do a triple toe loop?" So I was sure my daughter would come home with her enthusiasm dampened. Not a chance. She set the dining room chairs up like traffic cones so she could perfect her one leg out hopping on a precise rectangular path. Full steam ahead.
A top secret sweater I've been knitting for my FIL for his birthday on Saturday was also 
