mamacate

The Tragic Defeat of A Knitter

Ugh.

Last night was NOT pretty.  It's one thing to knit on with that vague feeling of dread, but it's another when another knitter looks at your knitting and says "yup, you're screwed."  And that's what happened last night.  There was the holding up of pieces of Elizabeth.  There was measuring.  There was the tragic realization that the stitches that made the bottom 46" around were eaten up by a center panel of twisted stitches, resulting somehow in the underarm, that place of far too much boobage on my particular bod, measuring only 38" inches around, which basically would have worked upside down but not so much with the boobage.  Boobular Elizabeth knitters be warned.  This is not a boobular sweater. 

There is great sadness.  Kristen suggests side panels.  I shall have to buy more yarn, and I have already bought more yarn and I am sick of buying more (very expensive) yarn for this sweater and the whole thing just makes me feel overweight and, well, overly boobular, and generally unhappy with my body, my knitting, my judgment and my investment of time and energy over the last six months.  I really thought I had this one right, I did.  The irony is that I started the sweater in a yarn that was too big for the pattern.  It would have come out just right.  I still have the 2" of sweater I knitted in it.  But I think I might have to undertake primal scream therapy before I actually knit this damn sweater again.

I did think seriously about a weight loss strategy motivated entirely by the desire to wear this sweater.  Don't worry, it didn't last long.  The 8" difference between the hips and the boobs, which is directly reversed from the actual difference in my hip:boob proportion [for those inclined toward formulae, sweater(hip>boob)<>body(hip<boob)=FUCK], will never work, regardless of what I do at the gym.  I think there are going to be side panels, just as soon as I get over myself and crawl into Webs for more yarn.  I need someone to hit the discount for me, since I may decide to give up on knitting and all, so there's no point in buying stash.  Anyone want to help a poor decrepit pudgy knitter with lousy judgment and expensive yarn?

So last night was fun times chez mama.  In between the wailing and the chest pounding and the rending of garments (not handknit ones, though, not yet, I still have hope for side panels), I decided that socks were my only salvation.  The knitting goddess laughed at me and made my Opal DK look completely hinky.  I mean, it's computer-printed GERMAN sock yarn.  How can it look messy knitted up?  Ha, laughs the goddess.

So out of the depths of the WIP pile came the Wrixlan Jacket.  And I was too lazy to get the book off the shelf so I just kept doing what I'd done so far on the row I was on (row two, what's your point?).  Turns out I should have checked because the rope cables on the front panels are twisted in a mirror image of one another, so I needed to unknit and retwist them on the next row.  But here's the thing, while I admire the OCD-ness of mirror-twisted cables, why aren't the back rope cables similarly mirrored?  This gets me all twitchy and in no way helps my state of mind.  You know?

Anyway, I put the damn thing in the Pile Of Knitting I Don't Want To Talk About (growing, at this point, from large to mountainous) and went back to my socks.  The goddess apparently wants me to knit socks.  I will say that my heels and toes are as nice as they've ever been, these days, what with all the practice.  I've even gone back to flap-and-gusset goodness after a long and torrid affair with short rows.  It was passionate, but we're just not right for each other, me with my deep heels and all.  Really, it's me, not the short rows.  I still love short row toes, I do.

I did start thinking maybe lace would be kinder to me right now.  I've been meaning to knit the Swallowtail Shawl for months now.  It's just that I hear this faint laughing coming from somewhere near the yarn stash...what is that?

Alive and Well-Socked

Sorry about that.

I'm alive.  Really.

I just got back from a business jaunt to a conference in Santa Fe.  There's this one organization I'm in that gives good conference.  Last year it was Miami, this year Santa Fe.  However, it's kind of weird how both times it was unseasonably cold.

Can I tell you how much I love New Mexican food?  I love New Mexican food.  Several of my conference buddies complained bitterly about having the same kind of food over and over, but I was in heaven.  Comida sin chile no es comida.  When I was able to order my food "Christmas" (meaning with both red and green chile), I was thrilled.  And if you're ever in Santa Fe, just install yourself in the Plaza Cafe and work your way through the menu.  It's cheap, it's delicious, it's friendly, and, well, I just wish every place in the world served sopaipillas on the side with a squeeze bottle of honey.  My main question is why there aren't New Mexican restaurants all over the country.  Really, it's the best food going.  I missed the fam and was ready to come home, but I really wish I could just teleport to the Plaza every day for lunch.  Maybe breakfast too.  Sigh.

I finished all the pieces of Elizabeth and need to block and seam her and then knit the neckline.  I live in fear that this sweater is going to be tragically unflattering, so, like a rational and intelligent knitter, I'm pretending it doesn't exist.  Isn't that the proper reaction when a sweater you knitted at a gauge of >6sts/in might be unwearable?  I thought so. 

Instead, I've been concentrating on low cognitive demand knitting.  Socks.  There have been many socks in recent weeks, and my feet are happy.  I have thoughts about sweaters--heck, I even bought yarn for Am Kamin (talk about high cognitive demand knitting!), but socks are just about perfect right now.

We have the world's greatest houseguest at the moment, so life is good, and we even had a chance to go out to dinner thanks to her.  Henry has fallen hard (apparently the other day he said he was "snorkeling in the love pond"), and the dog is convinced her life will be this good forever.  Nobody is going to be happy when she goes off to the next rotation.  Plus, how often do you get to talk about socks while watching dumb tv every night?  Even poor Rhys is putting up with the yarn talk and enjoying her presence.  January will be all too short.

Photos at some point.  Promise...

New Year's Non-Resolutions

Happy New Year.  Also all that other happy stuff this time of year that I wasn't around to say happy about.  Happy that.  If you got to eat latkes this year you're doing better than I am.  I had a moment where I thought about making them, but I had already committed to coating my kitchen with splattered oil 5 other ways this December, and I knew there wasn't room for it on the agenda.  No chestnut roast here too, though I did manage to eat bearnaise sauce twice in one month.

Which brings me to new year's resolutions.  Because there's been all too much bearnaise in the bod lately.

I have actually been successful with this sort of thing in the past.  I quit smoking in 1993 on new year's eve, helped by a horrible cold and a new tax on cigarettes that brought the price up to $2.00 per pack, which seemed like a lot then.  My idea was to save my cigarette money and go on a vacation the next year.  I never went on that vacation but we bought our first house the following year so the money went to good use.

But other than that, I'm just the kind of person who doesn't do so well with the self discipline.  (Note sock yarn stash.)  So I'm always tempted to make new year's resolutions, but then it would be the same thing every year and that's depressing enough without the blog archive to prove the cyclical nature of my lameness.  Plus, it's all so boring and typical.  I need to lose that 10 pounds I keep losing and gaining back.  I ought to stop treating chocolate like a major food group.  (Could these things possibly be related?)  I really need to keep exercising.  (By the way, it turns out that when I exercise regularly, I am a much, much happier, perceptibly healthier person.  The amazing thing is that this seems to motivate me to exercise not at all.  You'd think I'd have more constructive self-interest.)  Pretty banal, right?  Me and everybody else.  Also, the usual knitters' resolutions: shop the stash, finish WIPs, etc.

So anyway.  My new years' resolutions, or maybe they're just ideas...intentions, yeah, that's it...are as follows.

Keep eating chocolate like it's a food group and lose weight anyway because I'm exercising on a regular basis.  Which means riding my bike to work tomorrow.  It's the only exercise that doesn't feel like a total waste of precious time.  I guess I need to feel like I'm getting somewhere...literally.  The return of the light will *really* help with that.

Keep buying yarn when I want to, but don't do it just because I'm feeling bereft about my amount of crafting time.

Knit with focus and finish projects.  I've been doing this for the last 6 months or so, which makes for lousy blog fodder, but I'm surprised at the extent to which I'm staying focused.  I took some time off from Eliz, but she's almost done.  I finished not one but two pairs of socks on Saturday.  Let's not talk about the Xmas sweater, shall we?  I'm actually considering giving up.  But I'm cutting down on the active WIPs, and it's a good thing.

So there you have it, 2007.  I'm not going to kid myself and say I'm going to do Weight Watchers or something.  I've been promising myself I'd go to Bikram Yoga for the last year, but it hasn't happened yet, so maybe I shouldn't count on that.  Just me, the bike, and a reasonable number of socks in progress.  Even I should be able to manage that, right?