I Have A Plan

Oh yes I do, and it's taking shape:

Stay tuned!

In other news, I finished the knitting on this:

Which means that I can actually get going on something fun. I had to do it though, to erase my uncharacteristically bad knitting karma.

Here's the thing: I expect, every time I knit something, to have to undo a couple of hours of knitting, given that I generally alter patterns, if I follow them at all, and never ever use the specified yarn - blame that on my previous ebay habit from about 10 years ago that provided me with all the means to be incredibly busy in my retirement (around 20 years away - yes, that was a clue), and will ensure that I never die. And I rarely swatch, preferring the built-in swatching that is modular knitting.  Anyway, after SOAR 2006 I was on fire, and promptly cranked out three wildly successful sweaters (yes, I'm boasting; also, people on various blogs, having photographed them in the SOAR 2007 gallery, have said kind things about them) and then it stopped.

First, there was the not-my-handspun cardigan that had already fallen into The Burmuda Rectangle between my sofa and the wall.  This is where all stalled projects go.  They like it there, and will often stay for many years.  Sometimes I rescue them, sometimes unsuccessfully. Anyway, this was a gorgeously-coloured batch of, uh, poofy (Amy's nephew tells her that "fat" is a Bad Word) yarn (size 11-13 needles) that was too tightly spun to use for a comfy pullover, and so needed to be a jacket or cardigan.

Foolishly (see the next sentence)  I decided that since there wasn't a LOT of yarn, I should make a cardigan with cutaway fronts, you know, that looks as though someone cut away a huge pyramid of sweater from the bottom.  Turns out that cutaway fronts make me look about half my height, and about as wide as I am tall, which (given the half as tall thing I just mentioned) is really not my best look.

Discouraged my my design failure, I vowed to use a professional's expertise and  found something in the approximate gauge which looked as thought it would do the trick.  And it did. Unfortunately I didn't have enough yarn, and even though I know it's very fashion-forward to have jackets with elbow-length sleeves, (a) I think it looks stupid, (b) I think it looks dumb (yes I'm being redundant on purpose.  I'm making a point, dammit), (c) I don't think it flatters me, and (d) I'd have to extend the sleeves next season anyway, so I had to actually buy a skein of yarn to combine with two skeins from the stash, and alternate the triple strand (yes folks, three strands of worsted weight yarn gets the same gauge as not-my-handspun) with my paucity of yarn for sleeves, which naturally entailed knitting most of one sleeve before deciding that it was Not Successful.  Eventually though, success.  I even made buttons to match, though the safety pins with the little lump which are used for buttons which you'd like to remove every time you wash the garment, really don't work that well on a knitted fabric.  Still though.  Success.  I can't say it enough.  Success.  Success.

Then began The Time Of The Knitting Failures, although in truth, this time was interspersed with Knitting Successes, but as these fruits (not moldy or otherwise skanky) of my labour are no longer in my possession (I have a pair of nieces and a pair of nephews who have sweaters, two brothers who have socks, and a brother who has a handspun beanie with a bicycle motif), I can't look to them for consolation, since they are in Australia.

Back around April or so, I drove up to Toni at The Fold to sell my Jensen Tina II, a truly lovely wheel that had become tainted with bad juju due to the person who'd been using it for a few years, and simultaneously, or in really rapid succession, depending on your time scale, buy a Louet Victoria.  I don't believe in visiting new yarn stores without buying souvenirs, and in this case, it was some truly beautiful sock yarn with which I started knitting truly beautiful socks.  See?  Except that in order to actually wear them (which is almost always my goal when I knit things for myself, rarely knitting non-wearables) I'd have had to have had foot surgery to remove most of the bones in my foot, or otherwise make my feet narrower, which isn't happening any time soon.  I blame it on the pretty ziggy zaggy stitch pattern I invented.

Sock yarn is a very good souvenir, as it's usually under $20, packs well, and ends up being something I put on my feet every week or two, thinking, oh yeah, I bought that yarn at Toni's when I got caught in the ice storm and it took me ten hours to get home instead of five  Good times.

So that didn't happen, and the sock-in-progress is still.  In progress.  Though progress has halted, and will in fact be set back to the toe, where it all started.  Never mind though, I have the latest souvenir (of Chicago) socks in progress, and so far they don't need undoing.

Then, after the family knitting, and in order to have something to do on the very arduous travel home after visiting the family, I decided that the stash contained the perfect yarn for this tank top, and set about it.  Sadly, and I'm not laying blame here, the drape of this tank was such that it exposed more of my bra than I generally prefer (i.e. any), so instead of the Bermuda Rectangle which is a little full right now, the yarn got rewound.

There were other failures, but I'm repressing, because now I'm on to bigger and better things (at least in my own mind), and I finished Something.