Partly Cloudy

The view from my lap today looks like this (I like to knit cross-legged = ergonomic nightmare, but it somehow works for me so I haven't changed):

Do not be fooled:  The lace pattern you see (still unblocked, of course - use your imagination) is working at long last, but only because it (wee bugger of a lower border) has been frogged no less than three times.  Please Note:  This is a lace pattern I have executed successfully in something like twenty incarnations. 

My propensity to beat the tar out of a concept once I have mastered it causes me to recycle certain design elements until I lose interest in them, or until someone else points out that it's enough already, whichever happens first.  It's like when you finally find a recipe that everyone in the room will eat, doesn't cost a fortune and requires mostly normal ingredients (a convergence of cosmic proportions), and then you keep serving that dish until everyone is sick to death of it, mostly you.  This is the lace version of chicken and rice: Delicious and nutritious, and no one has noticed (YET) that it's the 4th time this week.  My time with this one is clearly at an end, however, and this is how I know:  I can't knit it anymore.  Sick of it.  It's dead to me.  I'll love it again a year from now, but for today I wish it were over.

The real problem, of course, is that I have angered the Knitting Gods, and they are toying with me.  I knew I was dangerously close to running afoul of their good graces, but I brazenly flaunted my new love affair with spinning, anyway.  I am just too besotted for any class of self-control.  If loving yarn is wrong, I don't wanna be right.  Last night I made my first 3-ply, and you would think I had cured the common cold.  I showed it to the smallies, who did their best to humor me: "Wow, Mom, that's really yarny".  Then to Phillip: "Where'dya get that from?" (evidently failed to notice the new spinning wheel in the living room floor, or the spouse glued to it).  Then, in desperation, the Dog:  Nothing.  Crickets chirped in the distance. 

It was a wake-up call, of sorts.  I resolved to stop tempting fate by neglecting my first love.  I reminded myself that the blog is labeled quite clearly "Knitting", not "Spinning", and that I have a responsibility not to bite the craft that feeds me by rambling on and posting endlessly about spinning. 

Too late.  Knitting Gods pissed off = lace border all jacked up. 

Bought and paid for it, I did, with my frivolous disregard for the danger inherent in flouting the rules.  Let's hope I can mend my evil wandering ways before this poor little cardigan pays the ultimate price.  The retribution of the petty and vengeful Knitting Gods is both swift and fierce.  Let's hope I can avoid further Wrath.  Me=Reformed. 

As If.

 

Just Like That

The very day that I posted about a lack of photographic evidence of the things I'm working on, I found something new to share after all.  The thing I needed was right there on the dining room table, and I had been walking past it for two days without seeing it.  Typical.  My dining room table erupts piles of mail at an alarming rate.  One day I'm gonna locate the continuum rift conducting these piles and plug it up for good.  Until that happens though, my strategy will be to manage the mail-hills by ignoring them until they become mountains.  Works a lot like the laundry heap, I notice:  Must come from the same quantum rift.

If I had opened the front cover of the latest Knit Picks catalog, I would have noticed that I had a photo for you the other day.  If I had remembered that I made a swell pattern for them due out in April, I might have visited the KP website and seen that there was a perfectly good show-and-tell opportunity right there:

This is the very same reverse-engineered pullover that I wrote about last November, finished in its proper yarn and pretty Dang Cute, if I do say so myself.  

{SOAPBOX ALERT:} I especially love that Knit Picks uses real humans to model their designs (isn't she lovely?) - I can imagine this on my sister, my neighbor, or any of the beautiful ladies in my life.  If you agree, let them know please - I'd love them to hear that showing designs on actual women instead of emaciated teenagers is appreciated by more than a few knitters. {END SOAPBOX}

I have to admit that I am still new enough to the design world that seeing something I dreamed up right there in the flesh is a real thrill.  I hope it will always feel like that.  It's not every day I get a horn of this nature to toot, so I'll just leave it like this:

Hope you like it too.
 

Prickly

I used a lot of pins to block this.  There.  I said it.  The truth is that I don't even like pinning things:  I used to be mocked openly when I was a ballet seamstress for never using enough of them.  They are fiddly, hard to hold onto, and dang POINTY on one end.  But the trouble is, if you say to someone who has OCD "Here are a few lace holes that really could stand to be opened up, and by the way, here are 3000 pins", then what you will get is this:

And This:

Voodoo Doll Knitting.  The Forest of Pin-itude. Pin-a-palooza.  Pin-tastic.

And heaven knows, it's not that I have too much time on my hands (evidence to the contrary).  I was so bored with pins after the hour and a half it took me to poke one in every single stupid yarnover that I think I may have entered a fugue state.  But I couldn't stop and leave some lace holes nicely blocked open and some untouched.  That's like playing God with lace - who am I to decide which holes are block-worthy and which are not?  So in the end the only fair thing (and the only thing that would allow me to sleep last night) was to block open every single hole in the lace.  And every single picot on every single edge.  Phillip smirked at my pain and asked if I'd read any Clive Barker lately. 

I do like the way this is shaping up, skin perforations aside.  You may remember from a previous post that this is a new project for Spring/Summer.  I'm using the incomparable Blackwater Abbey 2-ply worsted in Old Purple this time.  Big Fun, in spite of what Phillip is now referring to as "Your Pin Problem".  How do porcupines make love?  Carefully.