Closing Ceremony

As is usual, watching ALL of the Olympics (excluding hockey) requires some catching up by the end. It took me three extra days to finish watching everything, so that’s why this blog post is late. I did stop knitting once the closing ceremony was happening in real time though. This is what I accomplished:

I finished Land of Sweets including blocking.

A striped long cowl in many colors with a few lace panels.

I finished crocheting Eye of the Storm, but haven’t blocked it yet. I was really unsure about it right up until the very end. The middle colors turned out fugly, but the blue and brown border saved it.

A diamond shaped crochet shawl with a gradient radiating from the middle starting with a mustard yellow, morphing into white, then gray, then blue, then dark brown.

Finally, I got through about half of another shawl. This one was Rockin’ Rows by Martina Behm. I used Cascade Heritage for the gray, and the mini stripes are a Sweet Georgia set.

I also learned something from this set. I was having a really hard time winding the miniskeins into balls. They kept getting all twisted up and I’d have to weave the ball in and out of the skein to finish it. It was taking forever so I enlisted my sister to help, who likes untangling things. Well, she discovered that I was doing it wrong. I was only untwisting the skein halfway! Here is the skein as it starts, untwisted halfway, which is where I stopped, and untwisted ALL the way where it is much easier to wind.

A little teal twisted miniskein.

The teal miniskein, untwisted into a small hank.

The teal miniskein untwisted again into a normal sized hank.

I couldn’t believe how stupid I was. In my defense all the miniskeins I had encountered up until this point were not set up like this. I have dealt with many minis while knitting my hexipuffs and they were all wound into tiny hanks.

Here is the half a shawl I knit with the rainbow miniskeins.

A triangular partial shawl with zigzagging stripes of gray and rainbow colors.

This is the whole set all together. Everything I knit during the Olympics.

A striped knit long cowl, a gradient crocheted diamond shaped shawl, and a partial knit shawl with zigzagging stripes, all laid out on a floor.

I could probably have knit more if I really pushed myself, but job #1 during the Olympics is always to actually watch the Olympics. I watched 225 hours of Olympic coverage over three channels and witnessed 107 gold medals being won by the athletes! I spent up to 14 hours a day watching and by day 5 had to race the DVR so it wouldn’t fill up and stop recording. It was a close thing a few of those days. I didn’t watch the closing ceremony as by the time I got to it I was kind of exhausted and didn’t really care.

I got very frustrated a few times when the recordings would cut off the end of a competition and not pick it up again. I didn’t get to see the end of the gold medal match of women’s curling for example, I just heard about the results.

I got very emotional watching the aftermath of the women’s figure skating. The ROC team was a total shit show. The doper totally crumbled on the ice and got 4th place and was absolutely inconsolable, the silver medalist threw a temper tantrum because she didn’t get gold, and the gold medalist was left completely alone in the winner’s area holding a teddy bear and looking sad and lost with no one to hug or congratulate her. At least the Japanese bronze medalist was elated.

Doing this Olympic marathon twice within 6ish months was rough, but I made it. Now I kind of have a hangover. At least I’ll get a year off next year.