Some Unoriginality

So, flat on my back (which is a whole lot better than it was, which is to say "I Can Do Stuff Without Focusing On Pain"), almost done with Morning Edition online (I love NPR, and I love that I can listen to their programs at my leisure), I decided to give in to my desire for a 50% WIP increase and start on Norah Gaughan's Architectural Rib Pullover, because as it happens, I have some well-aged handspun in the stash, originally scheduled for a cardigan requiring gobs and gobs more than I have, and in which of course I lost spinning interest some time ago, so it sits in the stash. It's older than any romantic entanglement I've maintained, but younger than my teenager who will legally be able to drive later this year. Almost 600g worth of 2 plies Beast/1 ply handpainted silk, each of the three humungo skeins using a different silk ply. I like big skeins of handspun, I do. And I'm shooting for the 50% increase because (duh) I like the design because I love the way this woman's knitting mind works and because if I want to be Norah Gaughan when I grow up (even though I suspect we're not that far apart in age, in fact who knows? She might even be younger than me, though I don't think so) I'm going to have to work with a lot of her designs, and so far it's way in the single digits, so I have a ways to go.

Anyway, I thought I'd look around to see if I could find any bloggers who'd actually made it, in part because the neck is sort of wrong and ugly and besides I won't wear turtlenecks, and the most details I could find were here, but of course the story has no end and I can't tell just what went wrong exactly, but I'm not discouraged. I have two alteration plans, because I can't resist messing with a good thing; it's what I do (except when baking, as I don't have perfect pitch when it come to messing with proportions of fats, raising agents and the like):

(1) Short-row the bottom edge to avoid the dip in the middle of the hem. I'm all for creative hem shaping (one, hmm, no TWO of my favourite sweaters have zig-zag hems formed by garter stitch triangles), but I've been less than satisfied with sweaters with interesting travelling ribs that distort the hemline in arbitrary (and by that I mean "for no good design reason which in some way flatters") ways, such as this in which the model's hands disguise the fact that the hemline dips up foolishly.  I could have compensated with short-rows if I'd have thought it through OR SEEN A PICTURE BEFORE, but I didn't, and am instead left with an otherwise flattering tank in a yummy coral cotton-silk yarn that has saddlebags over my hips. Which naturally don't need them.

(2) Get rid of that crumpled turtleneck.  From the schematics and descriptions, it seems that the front neck opening actually does form a vee, but from the directions for the side sections which are knitted hem-to-hem over the shoulder, nothing is done to maintain the lateral spread, hence the wrinkles in the turtleneck. Perhaps. I'm pretty sure this means (and what else is new?) a protracted bout or two of what I really ought to call knitting experimentation or creative swatching or learning by doing or something that makes it appear that this is more than incompletely and only shallowly conceived plans, but hey, to quote someone more famous than I, I yam what I yam. 

And I do love yams, especially roasted with the skins on, but really any way, except with marshmallows and maple syrup. Here's something quite good: cook up a few yams and about half as many granny smith apples. Puree them with butter, some sort of heavy dairy liquid (the original recipe called for evaporated milk, but I bet cream or half-and-half would be great too) and salt and white pepper to taste. Nutmeg would not go amiss. Or alternate layers of sliced sweet potatoes and sliced turnips, adding the usual butter, cream and parmigiano, baked covered until cooked through, and then browned for yumminess.

(Sometimes I just have to indulge in my love for word association football. Now is such a time).

Although I've been trying to maintain my horizontalness for healing purposes, and although being vertical while standing or walking doesn't appear to exacerbate that nasty bulging disk in my back much, I might chance it to photograph the yarn of my plans (and I'm serious in my plan, as I've already wound one skein into its ball), but no promises. I will edit this later if so (or not. No rules against two same-day entries, is there?), but I had a screw-up which initially resulted in an empty entry which I can't abide and which I am attempting to rectify in a timely manner, except that for some reason I have verbal diarrhoea which means it's taking longer than it should.

[Edited later: see? I added the picture after all. The wound ball's extra ply is a Lambspun wool/silk blend, the extra ply in the front skein may actually be rayon, and the skein with the nasty blue acrylic tie is the only Truth In Advertising skein with an extra ply of handpainted tussah - with the extra extra (yes, I do mean to have two "extra"s) navajo-plied after I ran out of Beast.  But the plan here was to use handpainted silk as all the extra plies, only there were no extra skeins].

So the reason for the title of this entry was a mini-vacation at The Knitting Curmudgeon, another person I might like to grow up to be in terms of attitude, though it won't be as long of a journey as being Norah since I'm pretty much there anyway, just a little more circumspect in public, but I really wanted to quote her, apropos of absolutely nothing except the fact that I agree:

I hate the cult of "crone," by the way. That's even stupider than the Red Hat nonsense.