wacky, or just whack?

Sally Melville's The Knitting Experience: Book 2: The Purl Stitch, which hasn't even been published yet, is ranked 284 at Amazon.com. Think about that--it's pretty amazing. I was impressed that Folk Bags was at 4,316--not in the five digits, after all, and also not yet released. Umm, purling is just knitting backwards, or am I missing something here? I hate purling, personally.

finally some progress

I finished gypsy's sleeves tonight--all that's left is blocking and sewing, which I may wait on since I think I want to knit smooch before the summer's over, and there's plenty of weather-time left for wearing gypsy, plus I'm still working on phil(dar) and the mod coat. I never have this much stuff going at once--never!

I'm thinking a blocking board might be a nice thing to have, to replace my usual folded towels on the floor. This would make a good birthday gift, or perhaps a gift for someone if she gets into one of the top two library science schools in the country. (Hint, sweetie...) Of course, the latter one is a big if, but the birthday will probably happen. I'm not counting my chickens. I never count my chickens--they keep hopping around and it's hard to tell them apart. (Well, I guess that would be after they've hatched, which mixes up the saying, but whatever. I'm obviously metaphorically troubled these days.)

I'm still a needle jockey

the new new yoga

mad mod and flashy gypsies

The Mod coat has been a thorn in my side ever since I started it. Once I finally figured out the problem with the pattern, I'd be zooming along and realize that, hey!, I picked up/dropped a stitch here, so ribbit ribbit...thing is, I never managed to find out where the slippage came from, and the pattern never got messed up. I've finally made up all the stuff I'd frogged, plus a little--nothing like running in place for a couple of weeks--so late, late Weds. night, even though it was really just *too* late, I cast on the cardigan fronts for gypsy. Now I'm just zooming along on gypsy; I'd like to finish the fronts in a week, which I think is doable, then back to Mod for a week, then gypsy's sleeves and making her up.

I guess I won't finish Mod by the end of the summer, as I'd planned. Alas: the best-laid plans & all. I've never had as many problem with a project as I've had with this one, so I guess it's just my time. Plus, there's the Phildar summer top knit-along, whenever Alison decides to kick that off, and that'll set me back even more. But that sweater will be awfully useful in the sultry fall around here...

There is something going on that's going to keep me from spending as much time on my knitting for a little while, but I can't tell you yet...

what happened was...

That's the name of a movie, too, but more to the point, let me say that gauge wasn't the problem, and I feel stoopid for thinking it could be. Really stupid. Because that doesn't even make any sense. The real culprit: either a poorly-written pattern, or I can't read. Since I've always done pretty well on those verbal ability tests, I think it's the pattern. (Plus, sometimes there are things that can be read two ways, and you can read one of these things over and over and it's still the same to you, and then one time, boom!, you read it again and it reads differently. But maybe no-one else ever has this experience. The phenomenon is similar to that picture of a vase that is also a picture of two people in profile, if you look at the "negative space." Anyway, that's what I'm sayin'.)

I went down two needle sizes, and no luck. So I looked at the back of the next issue of Interweave to see if I could find anything in the "Oops!" section, and no dice. I decided to try swatching again, instead of knitting across the whole piece, which was taking to long (duh), and when I did the first two rows I realized I hadn't offset them correctly. Bingo! That was the problem: the pattern rows weren't lined up correctly, so they were making a vague pattern (which is why I thought it had to do with gauge), but not the right one.

This is how the instructions are written:

Work 1 (2,2,3,3,2) st(s) in St st, beg with Row 1 (of the pattern), work center 96 (101, 106, 111, 116, 126) sts according to diagonal pattern, work remaining 1 (1,2,2,3,1) st(s) in St st. Work through 4 rows of diagonal pattern 5 times.

What I read was "Work the extra stitches on the beginning and end of Row 1, work the other rows as written," because I figured that maybe the offset worked out to be the same, and the pattern notes said that, if you don't have enough sts left at the end of a row for a complete pattern repeat, just knit in St st. I guess I am just plagued by my own stupidity.

This is how I would've written it:

For pattern rows 1 & 3, work 1(etc...) st(s) in St st, work center 96 (etc...) st(s) in diagonal pattern, work remaining 1 (etc...) st(s) in St st. Purl all stitches in pattern rows 2 & 4. Work through four rows of diagonal pattern five times.

Alternatively, they could've been very annoyingly specific: Instructions for R1, for R2, for R3, for R4, repeat five times.

Frankly, I don't want to be forced to work very, very hard to read patterns.

All the while I was figuring this out, I was watching the Planet of the Apes marathon on AMC. Now that I have seen all five (who knew there were so many--I thought there were only four), I suppose I can die a fulfilled woman. Later, I was told I sounded like a Planet of the Apes geek when I said this about Bill Frist: "Someone should send him to the Planet of the Apes to be dissected by Zira, see how he likes it." After all, the man gives a whole new meaning to "curiosity killed the cat." What gall, to adopt animals from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to animals, and then to take them home and torture them. This is why potential applicants get screened these days, I suppose. And yes, I did sound like a geek, but after watching four movies in less than 24 hours (I've seen the first one before), what d'you expect?

The best thing about the last three offerings in the Apes series is: no Charlton Heston. There's only so much I can take of that man parading around in a loincloth, and that's not much at all. Roddy McDowall, however, is in all of them--he plays his Cornelius, and then he plays Cornelius's son, Caesar. Recycling!

take time to save time

By making a swatch, as they always say on the Classic Elite patterns. My ass! My Mod coat is not going well. The pattern of the stitches isn't coming out at all, which is very mysterious to me. So I went down a needle size; still no luck. I'm going to go down one more size, see how that works. Normally, I'm a very loose knitter, but I was going through a kind of tight phase, I think, when I did the initial swatches for this project. And swatch I did: three of them. And I've ripped out the beginnings of this coat I-don't-know-how-many times trying to fix it. (Initially, the problem was with the many methods of M1, but now that I've settled that matter, it must be gauge.) So I'm just trying the different needle sizes on what I already have cast on, and I'll start all over once I get what I need. I do think I'll scream, though--I've never, ever had such problems with a project, and this is a big project, too. Oh, woe is me.

This is the second time this year that my swatch has been completely useless for my project--it's as if I got caught in some kind of gauge warp between one thing and the other.

I am very amused that a Chinese artists has festooned the image of Rudy Giuliani with elephant dung. I can't think of a more deserving recipient.