I won! I won! I won!

I won! I won! I won! I won! I won! I won! I won! I won! I won! I won! I won! I won! I won! I won! I won! I won! I won! I won! I won! I won! I won! I won! I won! I won! I won! I won! I won!

Join me in a little dance!!

I can't believe it, but I really won Cookie's wordy post contest!!!

Go see the full results here.

I thought Laura from Magniferous would win, though I did have some hope of winning second prize for most pretentious post (7 years in academia will do that to even the nicest person, really!). But I won first! And it seems to be due in large part to my use of the word "hosieric," which, I confess, I made up. I did not, however, make up the word "frigorific." It's totally real and I plan to use it regularly from now on. While I'm confessing I might as well also admit that until coming across them in a list of "SAT words," I'd never heard of "noesis" or "fusiform." The rest, though, I mostly came up with by figuring out what I wanted to say in plain in English and then staring at the ceiling and thinking, "now, how would my most ambitious Freshman writing student say this?" until I came up with something. How much fun to throw nominalizations around like confetti, when I spend so much of my time hunting them down and eradicating them!

And I love that Laura (of Magniferous, above) and I both used the word "antidisestablishmentarianism" (or a form thereof), which apparently we'd both long been saving up for a good purpose. I learned it when I was working on my 4th grade newspaper, "The Harrington Grindstone," and my friend and I were in charge of polling people all over the school as to what they thought the word meant, and then we published all their answers along with the real definition, which we put into our own words in a way I still remember exactly: "it means the people who are against the people who are against the government." A little shady as far as definitions go, but better than what our poll victims came up with.

So, see, you never know when what you learned in 4th grade is going to come in extremely handy!

Because, folks, I WON FREE YARN!!!!!!

This is the prize I picked:



See Cookie's original post for the other prizes, the contest details, and links to the other entries.

It was really hard to choose between the universally fabulous prizes Cookie was offering. I mean, another one was...RED. And the third had NORO in it, which I've never ever tried, plus several other really interesting skeins that would have been great fun to experiment with. But in the end I decided the sock yarn was the most likely to get knit up soon. I've got a huge list of backlogged sock patterns I've been wanting to try (I'm working on perfecting the Priscilla Gibson-Roberts short row method now, but I want to try them all!), and sock yarn is the one area in which my stash is really inadequate, as sock knitting doesn't have nearly the same following in Russia, where I bought most of my yarn, that it does here. And it was just serendipitous that I've been eyeing the Fall VK but hadn't bought it yet.

What a frabjous, frabjous day indeed!!

This 'n That

A few little things worth posting about today.

1. Half of an FO:



I had some long trips on the subway in the last two days, so I finished the first of my husband's made-to-order mis-matching socks. He was delighted to try this on, but wouldn't be dragged away from the computer for a proper photo session. But he pays the price, since the foreshortening entailed by this angle makes his foot look enormous and sort of misshapen. The sock looks good though, no? This was my first sock in self-striping yarn, and while it was fun, I wouldn't be heartbroken if it were my last.

2. I also got started on the second sock:



Yeah, I know, but he really insists that he wants to wear these two socks together. What are you gonna do? And yes, he does have very pointy toes, but especially wide feet. Just think - if I wasn't a knitter, I'd never know these things about my own husband!

3.



Am I the only one with a fetish for looking at the wrong side of Fair Isle knitting? Maybe that's the real reason I knit it inside-out. I've always been tempted to knit something up that's meant to be worn inside out, but somehow I haven't gotten around to it yet.

4. All ye who like the button I made for your blog - take it! take it! I just copied whatever art was already on your blogs and made it button-sized (Photoshop is available on our campus computers, ura! - Gives me something to do while waiting in line to print out a 97-page chapter).

5. And I forgot (until now) to update you all on the other two "flavors" of soy candles I've tried since I last posted about the awesome headache-free candles I ordered from Wendy's Dame Candle Company. The one called "Cool Water" is, she says, meant to be reminiscent of men's aftershave or wherever it is men get that nice clean smell from. This may be why I like it better than my husband does, but I at least love it, and I swear it can make a whole room smell clean without actually having to clean it! Okay, doing both would be good, but there's only so many hours in the day. But my real, hands-down, can't-live-without-it favorite is the lavender sage candle. It's divine. It's magic. I like to have it near me when I'm working, so it may also be partly credited with my having finished Chapter Two more or less on time.

6. It's an even better thing that, for the moment, the diss is going well, because we got some bad financial news this week. There's still a decent chance things can be made right and we will in fact be able to make the rent through spring, when I defend my diss and can't [EDIT: holy Freudian slip!] get out of @$^$%&^@$ grad school, but at the moment the waiting is nerve-wracking. And I had just almost convinced myself (and my husband) that it would be okay to order my christmas/birthday present early so I could have that much more time to enjoy the much-coveted Options needles set and KIPer bags...but not quite yet. We're going to wait a bit till we know what's what. I despise being dependent for food and shelter and future employability on the whims of an administration made up of malicious madmen. I swear, I'm not even exaggerating for once. The admin in question is fast becoming notorious for almost single-handedly destroying a department that's been at the top of its field for decades.

But let's not think about what we can't change. Let's instead think about yarn and pointy sticks.

7. Maybe, by delaying my order of the Options set for so long, I'll end up with a second edition of them that has the size printed on each needle tip. Now, that would be worth it! The glass is half-full, folks.

8. And to further divert all our thoughts, a meme, which I just made up, based on reading the footnote to Franklin Habit's latest post:

The Meme Meme

What I like about memes:

I love finding out odd little things about people. I love finding out anything at all about a person I'm interested in. I like the way memes sometimes bring out very unexpected, but revealing, things. I enjoy trying to come up with answers myself - sometimes because it allows me to make jokes, sometimes because I surprise myself, sometimes because I get reminded of something I haven't thought about in a long time, and sometimes because I think of or realize something new. I like making up memes even more than filling them out, because I get to just ask whatever in the world I'd like to know about how other people think.

What I dislike about memes:

I hate it when the questions are written with bad grammar or bad spelling. I'm picky that way, but then, I teach writing. I can't help myself. I really hate most of the memes or quizzes on that site, though I often do them anyway. They are so often based on the worst kind of least-common-denominator, stereotypical (non-)thinking. They are more likely to obscure than to reveal, but then, the reactions people have to being told they're "mohair" or whatever, are often the interesting part, and in that case it's worth it.

My official position on tagging, and being tagged:

I agree with the grumps that it's sort of like getting a telemarketing call - vile. I always hate being told to do something I don't feel like doing. In fact, I might not do something just because someone told me to do it. If I read a meme I like, I'm likely to do it myself whenever I have a spare moment of procrastination time. I don't need to be pushed, and don't feel the need to push others.

If I were a meme, what kind of meme would I be?

A really annoyingly inquisitive, personal one. But interesting and well written.

FO - Hat!

Thanks in large part to the wonderful advice in the comments on my last post, I now have a finished hat!!



I thought about felting the first version into submission, as Dharmafey and the Purloined Letter suggested, but the problem was that I had knit it so tightly - it was practically as dense as felt already! So I feared that Beth would be right, and I'd end up with something that wasn't small enough to fit, but too felted to unravel.

Then the comment left by Domestic Bliss changed my thinking altogether - top-down! Of course! I have the Barbara Walker book, but somehow I was so mesmerized by the sweaters that I never even got to the chapter about hats. There aren't any berets or tams there, but what I did find gave me some food for thought, and I decided I could figure the thing out (I know, breaking my rule, but when the version that went according to instructions was so awful...?) But I wanted to start with Emily Ocker's cast-on for the beginning, so I went over to look at my copy of Elizabeth Zimmermann's Knitter's Almanac...and found that there's a tam pattern in there! Whaddya know? I guess I never thought I'd make a tam, last time I read that chapter. Anyway, hers is a very original three-cornered tam, with six decrease lines divided between the three corners, knit from the bottom-up, and at a different gauge than my yarn. But she helpfully pointed out that decreasing 8 sts every other round would make a flat thingie, so I decided to put in 8 shaping lines, evenly spaced around the hat so it would be round or at least octagonal. I liked that her hat was shaped in a way that made sense to me, and looked just like the tam that inspired this whole project - the one Harriet Vane wears at the beginning of the TV version of Dorothy Sayers' Have His Carcase. I'm a sucker for British yarn porn. Anyway. The EZ hat, like Harriet's, had spiral shaping lines up from the brim all the way to the widest part of the tam, and then down again to the center. This is what you'd expect from a tam, no? In the Handy Book of Patterns, you increase a lot all at once when you change from the brim to the main part of the hat, than you knit straight for what seems a ridiculously long time, and then you decrease very quickly across only about 3-3.5 inches. I guess you're supposed to block it into a tam shape from there. This seemed silly to me from the start, but I was trying to follow other people's directions, for once, and I hadn't yet seen the wonderful instructions in EZ's book.

Anyway. Following the EZ method but doing it from the top down, the hat knit up like a dream in one evening! First, I knit it this time on US8 instead of US4, deciding that I really didn't need a hat so weatherproof that it would deflect bullets, if it meant that my hands would cramp up knitting it. And the shaping worked - I swear - just like magic! When I had increased up to the number of stitches I wanted, I had exactly the length I wanted! Then the same again, when I decreased down to the brim! It was truly as if all the planets were aligned and were guiding my knitting. I used a commercial felted beret that I'd bought on the street and have had since at least college, if not high school, as a model, since once I dragged it out and tried it on I realized that it, unlike the options offered in the Handy Book of Patterns, was absolutely a perfect fit for me. And apparently it's some sort of magic size for tams, since the shaping to fit it came out so exactly right.

I also was able to use this hat as an opportunity to perfect one of those little techniques I've been wanting to practice - increasing by knitting into the back of the stitch in the row below the next stitch on the left needle. And I love it - it's much less fussy, for me anyway, than any kind of twisted M1, it looks very neat with no hole at all, and it's quick. I'm not entirely sure I'm doing it "right" or how other people do it, but I really like what I'm doing! Here's what they look like close-up:



This is still before blocking. I'm totally pleased with everything about the hat, and it looks just like the one that inspired it.

And, clearly, we've managed to establish that the Handy Book of Patterns is far from foolproof. At least with the tams, the shaping seems to be a sort of least-common-denominator style that can be best adapted to multiple sizes without having to print too much text, but is not necessarily the best kind of shaping for the item itself. Also, I think the big problem with it is row gauge. The two things I tried unsuccessfully to make from that book were both with slightly unusual yarns - a loosely spun llama one-play in the case of the mittens, and in this last case, the Peace Fleece, which has a slightly homespun quality to it and is definitely on the thicker side of worsted weight. I think those patterns may only work if you're - without having any way of know it - matching row as well as stitch gauge. Which you'd be more likely to do with a very basic, run-of-the-mill wool or cotton yarn, commercially spun to a fairly standardized weight (like the ones in the FOs pictured in the book). And even then, you have to exactly match one of the five gauges available, and in this case at least I had a lot of trouble getting it. I don't particularly relish having to knit five different gauge swatches before I can start, and then having to choose one that isn't necessarily my favorite fabric, but at least fits into one of those slots. But, that said, I don't think the book is useless. A few of you mentioned having some success with it, and I think I'll still refer to it if only as a reference for the standard techniques used to make the most basic shapes, which I can still use as inspiration and reference to go off in my own directions. But I'm certainly going to double-check anything in there that seems funny, next time! And for sweaters...my god, why bother, when you can follow the EZ or Barbara Walker methods to make anything, and have more fun in the process?? That's my feeling, anyway...

In other news, the lace tank is at 7 inches. I start shaping for the armholes at 14, so there's still a ways to go. The Fair Isle is really marching along, though - I should be able to finish the body quite soon! And my chapter got sent off to my professor today. I'm actually going right into work on the next chapter already (deadline is looming!), but I'm going to keep that "100% done" progress bar on the sidebar for just a little while anyway. :-)

Oh, and Brena commented to say that she made the lace tank, in brown, and isn't too happy with the results. Hrm. I'm kind of worried about this, too. The color may be part of the problem, but then, mine's orange, so I'm facing potentially the same outcome. I knew I should have held out until I found kidsilk haze in pink, which is what I really wanted (which would have been especially worth doing, since I didn't get around to casting on for the project for years anyway, but my husband loves "monk orange" and talked me into it.) We'll see. I did find a gorgeous finished tank and cowl over at whispering pine - she made it back in 2005, and it looks fantastic! So that gives me hope. I'm loving the yarn enough right now to finish it at least. Besides - Brena, maybe you should make the cowl - if the combo still doesn't work, you'll have a lovely separate cowl, and the two together might really look great, in a retro kind of way. I plan to wear mine over a pink tank top, so I think that might help the color wake up and look more up-to-date.

Oh, and one more thing (I know, I know, my posts are really loooong - you should see my chapter! muahahaha!) Anyway. I noticed that there was a big spike in visits to my blog after Yarnival came out - yay! A big, fat welcoming hug to any new readers - thanks for coming, I love to hear from you, and come back again!

I promise to show some steeks in the near future. :-)

Sigh. Okay, one more thing. It's a certain anniversary today. I don't even like to talk about it, and I'm really glad I don't have a TV, because I absolutely could not take all the crap the networks are putting out there right now. I'm in NYC, I was here five years ago, I was lucky and didn't know anyone who was killed, but nearly everyone I know knew someone, and I'm just hoping we all get through the day without anything else happening. It's a beautiful day here today, just like it was then, and that somehow makes it worse. For once, I wish it were cloudy.

EDIT: I have copied or created buttons for a few of the blogs I read most often, so I can have a pretty quick link to them in my sidebar. If anyone minds, just let me know!

Survey: Future of the Hat

First, the good news.

The Fair Isle sweater continues to go along swimmingly:



It gives me endless color-joy, and never fails to provide a much-needed respite following upon either the diss, or the lace.

That said, however, the lace has also been behaving itself lately (knock wood):



It grows so fast, and now that I've got the pattern down to the point where I can tell where I am at a glance and can get that hmm,-something's-wrong-here feeling when I make a mistake, it's actually quite easy. Now I can relax enough to enjoy how wonderful this yarn really is (rowan kidsilk haze, of course). It's my first time using it, and now I can see what all the fuss is about.

But you knew there was bad news coming. Hard as it is to believe, it was the red hat. The simple, stockinette-stitch red hat that I was knitting for therapy during my early issues with the mohair. Look what happened:



Sigh. I'm getting really good at frogging.

But I have to ask - has *anyone* made anything from the Handy Book of Patterns without running into trouble? This is only the second project I've done from there, but the previous one, a mitten for Hubbster, came out all wonky and out of proportion THREE TIMES until I finally gave up and stuck the yarn back in the stash. I thought I couldn't go wrong with the plain tam, and indeed it seemed to go along swimmingly until I got to the decreases at the top and realized that if I followed instructions it would take something like 8 inches, instead of 3.5, to get down to 6 stitches. I figured my row gauge (which is not specified in these patterns, and that's major problem in just such a case as this) was way off from what Ann Budd got, and I adjusted accordingly. This worked out fine, but by the time I got near the end and tried it on, as you can see, it hit home that the main part of the hat was also way off. I knit it shorter even than the pattern said to, and it was still at least an inch too long, not to mention too wide.

So I'm taking votes - please tell me in the comments what I should do:

1. Start over, doing the same thing but just casting on fewer stitches

2. Start over, making a tam but making up the measurements as I go along because it would probably work better than this

3. Make something else with the yarn
3a. If so, what?

I have two full hanks of Peace Fleece worsted weight. I did the tam really tightly, on US4 and getting about 5 sts/in. On US5 I got 4.5 sts/in. It's a chunky worsted, though, so in anything other than a hat I'd knit it at a looser gauge. The tam seemed to only require one hank, so I was thinking of making a pair of fetching fingerless gloves with the extra, using a little scrap Peace Fleece in blue for accent color on the cuff if I ran out. Maybe I should make the wrist-warmers first, and if there's still yarn left, then I can worry about a hat?

I already have a red scarf, in gorgeous cashmere, so I'm not going to go that route. I bought the yarn in red for me and blue for Hubbster when we got engaged (it's half-Russian, half-American yarn, nudge-nudge, get it?), and I already made him a hat-to-order with the blue, so that's kind of why I wanted to make a hat out of the red. Anybody have any favorite sure-fire hat patterns out there? Preferably not stocking caps or skull caps, as they make me look hideous. I need a hat with body.

In other news, the finishing up of my chapter has been slightly derailed by a migraine, but I expect to send it off to my professors tomorrow. Ura!! Thanks so much for all your support, guys, and I'm so glad you liked the excerpt! The Purloined Letter cracked me up, pointing out that more people have now read that excerpt than are ever likely to read the diss, which is so true. If only I could write the whole thing about knitting! Sadly, the misguided faculty at my venerable institution of higher learning don't give out PhDs for that. Even though the diaries that provide one of the main sources for my diss mention knitting on almost every page!! I promise I will gather that material into an article sooner or later, though, because it's too wonderful not to expose to the widest audience my writing will ever have!

Glad you all liked the pictures, too. I absolutely fell in love with that village in Russia -- the manor house still exists, too, and is being used as the village school -- and when I learned you could get a house there for about US$1,000 (a little house, NOT the manor house, alas)....well, we're keeping the idea in the back of our heads, let's say that much!

The yellow leaves, though, was a shot taken in the wilds of New Hampshire last year. We're going again this year in a few weeks, by which time I hope the foliage will again be spectacular. I adore New England!

In other news, despite a very excellent suggestion from Beth about transport, I think I'm not going to make it to Rhinebeck. Even if I could get there, and could also justify the hotel, I really don't think I could trust myself amongst all that fiber not to go on a spending spree! We're on an extra-small stipend this year because I'm not teaching, so I can finish the diss, so I'm really trying hard to keep myself on-task. My husband pointed out that once my PhD is done and we get jobs, I can spend all my time and money in the pursuit of fiber, for many long years to come. It's a good point. That said, I'm SO going to be at the Knit-Out in Union Square and I'm going to see the Yarn Harlot in person, wa-hoo!!! And I'm totally going to at least some of the knitty-related events at The Point. So if you're going too, let me know, and let's find each other!

Speaking of harlots. Just this morning, I happened to say to my husband (in the context of talking about how education should be free and Canadian schools), "You know what The Yarn Harlot said?"

...and my Soviet-born husband cracked up, and said, "you know, that sounds just like, 'You know what Comrade Stalin says?'"

Hm. He may have some small kind of a point. I tend to quote the Harlot a lot, and sometimes, like this instance, it's not even about knitting. What can I say, she's a wise woman.

I'm going to take advantage of having to wait anyway to edit my draft with a red pen for Hubbster to return from campus with the print-out (at 97 pages, I'm not about to print it at home on our little Dell McPrinter) , to knit for a while and fully recover from the migraine. Absolutely justifiable, n'est-pas?

Yarnival is out!

The awesome Eve at Needle Exchange has put out the first issue of Yarnival!

Check it out - I'm in there!



Just so that this post isn't entirely devoid of real content, here's an excerpt from the chapter I'm finishing (98% done! so close, I don't have time to update the progress bars in my sidebar!), which happens to be about knitting. The diss, btw, is a microhistory about a nineteenth-century Russian gentry family. This chapter is about the mother's estate work:

"Natalia Ivanovna's needlework, done with her own hands, included chiefly sewing, lace-making and knitting. In addition, she oversaw the processing of their own flax into linen fabrics of various weights. She sometimes spun herself, but more often oversaw serf spinning and weaving. While she did sew many items of the family's clothing and occasionally some scarves or shirts for serfs, she was more likely to cut out the fabric herself, and assign the sewing up to the "women" or "girls" who worked inside the house. Weaving was done in an outbuilding, and there seems to have been a chief weaver, assisted by various others; the weavers were both male and female. Cotton fabrics, as well as the occasional fancier material or a finished garment, were purchased - sometimes in Moscow in the case of very special articles. One diary entry indicates that knitting stockings both kept her occupied when she was supervising labor for long periods of time in the fields or barns, and that, on the other hand, this necessary supervision gave her the time to complete many pairs of stockings each year: 'I spent all day in the field. The women reaped 2000 sheaves. I started a little stocking and got to the toe. They gathered more than the second chetverik of the heads [of the stalks].'"

And here's a picture taken on their estate in a remote village in Russia, where I visited a year ago while doing my research in an archive nearby (that's the limewood allee put in by the people I'm writing about, and still recognizable, if a trifle overgrown):



Without further ado, I'm off to go dive into the Yarnival - it looks like there's lots of great stuff there!

Urge to Knit Overpowering

Almost. Done. Now. Must. Finish. Must. Not. Knit. Urge. To. Knit. Is. Killing. Me.

Specs - you rock my world.

Funny, Enlightenment propaganda is breaking my head, too. What's up with that?

Knitters are great supporters, as well as givers, and warmer-upers.

Oh, and by the way: the red hat is no longer going well. It doesn't seem to like the propaganda, either. Will say more later, when the chapter is sent off to its favorite prof.

I know, I know, how could a plain old stockinette hat go wrong? I'll show you next time.

Random picture for lack of knitting picture:

Saturday Sky - first and last

[cough, cough]

Well.

I bet we're all glad I got that out of my system, aren't we?

Seriously, though, what a fantabulous idea for a contest, no? If you haven't already, go read the other entries. They're freakin' hilarious, and brilliant. My personal pick for the best one so far is at a blog called, of all things, "Magniferous." Laura's post there is pure genius. As someone who reads a LOT of academic prose, both the published-yet-still-horrible kind and the other, even more frightening kind written by undergrads and known in polite circles as "false high style," I got the hugest kick out of Laura's (absolutely correct and purposeful) use of a dizzying variety of mostly foreign phrases much loved by pretentious academics, and a few other even weirder ones, besides!

Although I also just adore the "scholarly apparatus" put to such brilliant use over at the Three Fates, too.

If there could have been anything better to amuse myself with at the end of every day of laboriously editing my diss chapter (which is turgid, and confused, but thankfully not nearly as bad as either of my previous two posts), I can't imagine what it would be. Huge thanks to Cookie at Knitter's Anonymous for making happen. She's making an incredibly gorgeous sweater, too, by the way.

So my chapter's almost done now, within days of its deadline.... Oh, my knitting? You want to hear about my knitting?

Well, okay. Actually, I've worked out a good system these last few days. At the point where my brain freezes and I can edit no longer without tempting myself to just fill 70 pages with "I can't take this anymore, let me be freeeeee.....", I stop, turn on some music, or podcasts, or Sopranos, and I knit. For the past few days (for those who were actually bothering to follow along in the previous two posts, this won't come entirely as a surprise), I've been working on the mohair lace tank, the plain red tam, and the Fair Isle sweater all at the same time. I'm doing two rows of lace first, just to keep the pattern sticking in my mind (although this equals a half inch of progress, too, so it shouldn't take that long, really), and to take advantage of the first 20 minutes or so of mindful knitting time I have before I completely blow a mental gasket. Once the gasket is blown, I switch to the hat, and keep going at it until my wrists start to tingle (I'm knitting Peace Fleece worsted on US4, so that the fabric is stiff and virtually weatherproof). That gives me about an inch or a bit more (so the hat is now more than half done). Then I knit away at the Fair Isle until whenever I nod off or Hubbster forcible drags me away from it, so I'll be able to get up in the morning.

I'm still loving the FI to pieces, but I decided to take some time away from it now for the other projects rather than risk Obsessive-Compulsive Knitting Disorder. You see, I was afraid I'd obsess and do nothing but FI until I got to the steeks, and then, partially from exhaustion and from not doing other fun projects, I'd tell myself I just need a little "break" before I gear up for the steeks, and next think I know, I'd have a UFO. All the worse because two steeks, for the armholes, have to be done before I can knit the sleeves (picked up from the steek edge and knit down), and it'd be so sad if the combination of steek-dread and sleeve-dread kept me from finishing. So, I'm pacing myself. I plan to get to the steeks in fine fettle, rested, excited, and ready for a challenge. Not to mention a change of pace from the mohair.

So, as you may have gleaned from my Ode, the mohair was giving me a little trouble. I was stupid, I didn't do a gauge swatch, so it took me the first four rows to get a handle on the pattern, and in the process what I'd done looked like crap. So I ripped it out, with some difficulty, and had to cut off the last few yards that had been the cast-on, because the two strands were just cemented together and there was no way to salvage the yarn. So if I run short in the end, I'll just have to have a narrower, very short scarf instead of that sexy cowl.

I bought the yarn - actually it was given to me as a birthday present from Hubbster back when he was my boyfriend -- all of about three years ago. That's how long it's taken me to get to this pattern! But it's under control now. Since I've re-started, I've got the pattern down. It's actually insanely simple, but the problem is in using the huge US 10 needles with tiny Kidsilk Haze, and in being able to see what's happening under all that mohair halo. But so far, so good, knock wood.

I tried looking up this tank and cowl in google, and found only a few references to people contemplating it, or starting it, but nobody finishing it and showing off its finished gorgeousness. Given the popularity of the book (Weekend Knitting), this is suprises me. Is there something I should know? Is this one of those Impossible Patterns that no one should actually try to make?? Do any of you know anyone who's done it??

And I've been so proud of myself for actually making two patterns with the yarns called for. I'm not sure I've ever done that before, much less two at the same time.

But I have no pictures, because everything looks about four rows further along than you last saw it.

So here's some Saturday Sky:



Ew. Sorry. Okay, I promise I won't do that again. Too depressing. Saturday Sky is not for people who live in a "cheap" neighborhood of Manhattan.

Oh wait - how about this one?



That's our screen! It's what my camera decided it liked more than the sky, the first time. Or maybe it was that in place of "sky" there's really just a great, polluted nothingness, and so the camera couldn't find it. Anyway. No going to the park and working on the sock today....

Off to print out my chapter draft for final editing!!