'Tis the Season

The season of tempting garden catalogs flooding into the mailbox.

I've been a gardener long enough to realize that 90% of my extravagant winter garden plans don't come off.

Spring comes, and the soil is still frozen, or too wet, or it rains for eleven days, or the mosquitoes come out early and there is a limit to the number of times I can swat myself in the head before giving up and going indoors.

But in the winter, all things seem possible in the garden. Once again it seems possible that I will start all my seeds on time and plant all my transplants without being frustrated by cutworms, chipmunks, or groundhogs. Once again I can curl up and dream with pictures of heirloom tomatoes and zinnias the size of my head.

Winter is also knitting season.

With the garden put to bed and the lawnmower snowed into the storage shed, I have an excuse to sit indoors in the warm and knit.

Here are some of the diagrams I drew of the funky corner pieces that a knitted circle needs to become a knitted square.

(If you need an excellent compass for drawing circles, I blogged about my mmArc in this post a couple of years ago. And now I can point you to the joy of Google Patents and tell you that this is US Patent #5,615,485. Safe-T Products was acquired by a company called Learning Resources in 2006, and Learning Resources sells both the mmArc in millimeters and the orange Safe-T compass in fractions of an inch.)

And here is how the math geekery works out in the actual knitting.

(Did I ever mention that this is not a blog where you will find math hate or weather hate?)

And now for something completely different - as long as I'm talking about geekery and thinking about weirdness, I just noticed that Monty Python has a YouTube channel.