Breaking For Sleeves

Scripture Reading: Bemidbar (Numbers) 14-15

Num 15:38 "Speak to the children of Yisra’ĕl, and you shall say to them to make tzitziyot on the corners of their garments throughout their generations, and to put a blue cord in the tzitzit of the corners.
Num 15:39 "And it shall be to you for a tzitzit, and you shall see it, and shall remember all the commands of יהוה and shall do them, and not search after your own heart and your own eyes after which you went whoring,
Num 15:40 so that you remember, and shall do all My commands, and be set-apart unto your Elohim.
Num 15:41 "I am יהוה your Elohim, who brought you out of the land of Mitsrayim, to be your Elohim. I am יהוה your Elohim."


Tzitziyot (plural): These are tassels that we put on the four corners of our garments for the reasons YHWH explains above. It was a tzitzit (singular) on Yeshua's garment that the woman with the issue of blood was reaching for and touched--


Luk 8:43 And a woman, having a flow of blood for twelve years, who, having spent all her livelihood on physicians, was unable to be healed by any,
Luk 8:44 came from behind and touched the tzitzit of His garment. And immediately her flow of blood stopped.


She surely knew the prophecy--

Mal 4:2 "But to you who fear My Name the Sun of Righteousness shall arise with healing in His wings. And you shall go out and leap for joy like calves from the stall.


The Hebrew word for the corners of garments is the same as the word for 'wings'. She knew there was healing in the tzitzit of the Messiah, and she reached out and grabbed it!


Here are a couple of sets of tzitziyot I have made for my family:






Pinwheel Sweater: Last night, I knitted to the point of having to make the breaks for the sleeves, or I guess it might be more appropriate to say the holes from where the sleeves will eventually grow. In this picture, the holes for the sleeves kind of look like capital D's facing away from each other (one facing the top of the picture and the other one facing the bottom of the picture). The rounded parts are the stitches on the cable stitch holders--you can see the buttons on each end of them. The flatter-looking side of the 'D' shape are the newly cast-on stitches to replace those that were put on the holders. The easy part was putting the correct sections of stitches on the stitch holders. But then these stitches needed to be replaced in the main body of knitting with what is called a 'provisional cast-on'.


In this type of casting on, the stitches are cast on in kind of a figure-of-eight fashion, where one loop of the '8' is on the knitting needle and the other loop of the '8' is on a piece of scrap yarn. This is best done by looping that top loop of the '8' onto two knitting needles held together so that the resulting stitches won't be too tight. The reason for the loops (stitches) on the scrap yarn is that those will be picked up on the needles later along with the stitches on the stitch holders to start knitting the sleeves in the round. In the closest-up picture you can make out the blue cable of the circular needle and the white scrap yarn and get a sense of this provisional cast-on.






What I'm really happy about is that I've gotten to this point and still haven't used up my second skein of yarn, so I'm hoping that bodes well for me having enough yarn to complete this sweater. Also, at this point in the knitting, I added a third cable to the circular needles, so now I'm knitting on the three longest cables from my Denise set connected together. Off the top of my head, I can't remember the measurements of those cables, but put together, they make a pretty big circle. The next change in the pattern is a few rows away, when the increases change from yarn-overs to knitting in the front and back of the final stitch of each section of the pinwheel instead. That would mean no more eyelets left by the yarn-overs, and I'm not sure I want to make this change because I like the eyelets, so I may just keep doing the yarn-over increases throughout the entire circle of the sweater.


The Transformers: We watched the movie, The Transformers, last night. My daughter and I had already seen it on our plane trip to Houston last month, but the rest of the family hadn't seen it. Everyone really enjoyed it. It was more fun watching it all together. For some reason, the funny parts were even funnier to me the second time around!


Dinner Tonight: Tacos.