Ultima Thule

When I decided finally to learn to knit this past February, I assumed that it would be years and years before I would be able to do something as complex as a sweater.

My friend Sally, who has been knitting since childhood, assured me otherwise. "One scarf, one pair of socks, one sweater," she told me.

Sally is someone I trust so much that, if I were sitting in a room in a chair, at dawn, and she went to the window and said, "hmmm, the sun is rising in the west today," I wouldn't even bother to get up to go to the window to double check her.

And so, here I am, actually with a few scarves and socks and some booties and baby blankets, but little else behind me, knitting the sweater shown in some previous posts.

I love doing this in part because there is so much to learn. I am going to know so much more about knitting at the end of this sweater than I did at the beginning (and already do) that it will be a much bigger experience than simply having a sweater that I knit myself.

That having been said, my knitting ship is rapidly coming in sight of the edge of the known world, or "Ultima Thule" as the ancients called it.

According to Wikipeida,

Ultima Thule in medieval geographies may . . . denote any distant place located beyond the "borders of the known world."

Some time between today and Tuesday (the sooner if I can tear myself away from this computer) I will be getting to parts of the pattern where I don't even understand what they're trying to tell me to do, much less have any sense of how to do it.

Fortunately, my Saturday knitting group has a much bigger Tuesday counterpart which often includes some of the Truly Knowledgeable, who come and sit and knit. I am going to use my lunch hour and take myself and my partially-finished sweater to this repository of accumulated wisdom and see if someone there can help me slowly, and perhaps over a period of weeks, transform Ultima Thule into just another well-mapped part of the knitting universe.