Life's a Stitch

When I was a little girl, and would find a Canadian penny on a New York street, my father told me "Hold onto that, it’s worth more than a penny." I’ve lived in Canada for the past 23 years, and not once, until Friday, was a Canadian penny worth more than a US one. You can’t imagine how that past discrepancy in dollars has affected our daily life.

We moved here with an existing US mortgage. Just five years ago that $600 monthly payment cost as much as $960 CDN. Now that we are finally rid of that payment, it would currently cost us $596.40. You have to believe that it all evens out in the end, or you’ll drive yourself crazy. Like in the case of buying a $15US skein of Touch Me back then for $24CDN. Now it would be $14.90. Not that that tempts me. Really.

A Sevillian sleeve update: picked up stitches from the cabled trim and modified the pattern to work in the round. My opinion on picking up stitches follows. When pattern instructions call for a number of stitches to be picked up, sometimes that number makes sense, and at others it doesn’t. The number to be picked up is too far off from the number of edge stitches. For example, this particular pattern told me to pick up 54 stitches from an edge of 72. If I picked up that number it would leave regularly spaced noticeable gaps around the cuff. Instead I picked up what felt natural – 72 stitches – and made the correction in the next row. I did the math, knit a few stitches and then knit two together, and repeated this, ending up with the requisite 54 stitches with no apparent holes. This is the second project on which I worked this past week, where this method has made sense.