I Be Steekin' (with apologies to Clarence Carter)

My step-brother and his girlfriend had their first child in January, and my mom asked me to make an afghan for the little mite. But you have to understand: I don’t DO afghans. It’s not that I don’t LIKE afghans—I just don’t DO afghans. And for a perfectly simple reason: I taught myself to knit when I was about sixteen, one boring and sweaty Georgia summer. At the end of which, I had one pair of sweltering, acrylic, Kelly green, garter stitch “slippers” with only a vague resemblance to human feet. The next project was a scarf (natch), an interminable RECTANGLE of boringness. I put down the scarf about a quarter of the way through, and didn’t pick up knitting needles again until grad school. Whereupon, I vowed to never again knit (damned) rectangles. I started back up with a sock—and haven’t looked back.

I was in a dilemma then: how to knit an afghan (which is, broken down to essentials, a really BIG rectangle) without breaking my vow? Then I discovered Sleepy Monkey. It’s perfect; stranded colorwork, knit in the round, steeked, then assembled together with a border. Voila! Instant afghan, no rectangles required. Plus, it’s cute as a bug (as we say here in the South). The only problem I could see is that I’m still a new knitter, and I’ve never steeked anything. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the handy sidebars in the pattern, I wouldn’t have known what a steek was.

It didn’t sound all that bad. People have done this sort of thing before, right? I mean, people have been knitting for damn near forever, and so, this stuff works, right?

I was sanguine—until staring at two tubes of (for me) painstaking colorwork.

Cut? My knitting? You must be joking. Who the hell would even think of that? Someone for whom every stitch isn’t still a miracle, obviously. Okay, so you sew reinforcement, but still.

It had to be done, though, unless I want to give the kid a couple of sleeping bags. Don’t catch your toes in the floats, Kid. Good luck. Have fun. Aunty Ms. is going to go have a large whiskey tonic now.

No. We must protect the kid’s toes. So.



All went well, except that I managed to cut some of my floats.

On the feckin’ monkey square, too. I’ll attempt to weave those in. Oh, superwash wool, why won’t you felt when I need you to?