I have to confess that I got a little seduced by Brooklyntweed's frequent praise of the garter stitch. He goes on and on about how rhythmic and soothing it is to knit in garter stitch (knit every row, as opposed to knit and purl subsequent rows for you non-knitters). One person's comfort is apparently another person's torture. I've never really done anything in garter stich other than this jacket, and I didn't realize how much harder it is to correct than regular stockinette knitting, and how impossible it is to measure. Impossible, that is, unless you actually count the rows that are formed by the stitch pattern. Lo and behold, you actually can count them, which I discovered this morning. So now all the misshapen work is ripped out, but I'm too wary to start right in again. Again, sigh. I so wanted to have this thing done. Feels like I've been working on it forever.
On the up side of things, yesterday I finished off some major adminstrative stuff at work, which freed me up to start thinking about my next conference paper, which is going to be on Henrik Ibsen's Når vi døde vågner. Here's a sketch of the first act that Ibsen made in his manuscript:
I actually managed to bang out about four pages! The conference isn't until the end of April, but we're reading that play in my "space and place in literature" seminar this coming week, and I wanted to present a preliminary version of the conference paper to the students on Wednesday. I've really been focusing on the nuts and bolts of literary scholarship and publishing, and I wanted to give them a good model for an academic presentation.
