sara skates

when you have a solid 10 inches of a sleeve as gauge exemplar (i.e., done up to the armhole shaping), and you decide to change the design from 3/4 length sleeves to full-length sleeves (as it’s more practical – I don’t own many 3/4 sleeve underlayer shirts), and you do all the complicated mapping out of math and when to do increases, and you start again -

suddenly your row gauge is no longer 6 rows per inch but 5 rows per inch???

Sigh.

I am OFTEN often really often guilty of knitting a “swatchette” of about the size of 1″ by 1″ or so.  In those cases, duh, it’s not a surprise when gauge issues surface.  When I have a sleeve practically done though, except for armhole shaping?

It’s a surprise, and not necessarily one of those fun amusing exciting kind of surprises

Tags: Knitting, Manon

That assertion in the last presidential debates totally irked me, for so many reasons.

Christy says it best though.  Don’t miss this post.

I knit.

I have been skating like crap for weeks lately, and often not even enjoying it, which is really rather upsetting.  That’s a total understatement – that something I adore to my core is now just frustrating and not so fun?  Eesh.  I can deal with the frustration of learning new skills and it taking forever and a day.  In fact – I enjoy that kind of frustration – no matter how you slice it, there’s always something new to learn on the ice and part of the fun for me is going through that process.  Not so much the frustration of the disappearing joy.  I’ve tried taking a break, I’ve tried pushing through it, I’ve tried everything I can think of – and the real problem?  Hard things from other parts of my life are oozing over way too much.

I have been eating way more than my body needs, and drinking way more alcohol calories than usual with the now-requisite nightly gin and tonic.  (I am however enjoying my exploration of gin.  And this blog.  So far?  Junipero is my favorite brand.) 

Work has been – upsetting to say the least.  Crimes happen, this one affected a whole whack of people and has had major repercussions on my office, my job, my university and yes, on myself.  Despite the lack of personal culpability a whole lotta crap has come my way.  Enough said really.  Really?  It sucks all around.  And there’s much work, trials, and tribulations to be gone through before attaining a more even keel.  The positive?  Really the only positive I can think of is that I am now probably an expert on maintaining security of sensitive data.  If you need someone to do that kind of job, I’m a really good person to hire.

Knitting however?  I think I’m trying to knit myself back together.  I am less than two 3/4 length sleeves away from finishing a sweater (Manon) – at the moment, it’s a sweater vest heh and it fits fabulously.  I can’t wait til it’s blocked and ready to wear.  I have pictures on the camera, but I’m here and the camera is not.  I started it a little over a month ago; I had a few false starts in the name of gauge issues and an out of town trip with smaller more portable knitting instead.  It’s a record for me in terms of progress towards an FO.

Is it a problem that my last three sweaters knit (counting this one) have all been about the same color of green?

Certainly, this is not the first overlay of linguistics and politics.  If you ever have a chance to see a talk by Noam Chomsky, you won’t be disappointed.  Well, technically he doesn’t always overlay the two topics – but he’s a phenomenal linguist and someone who synthesizes politics topics phenomenally too.

But this article on diagramming sentences uttered by Sarah Palin is entirely worthwhile.

(note:  While it’s not where I ended up, I took a lot of linguistics courses during grad school.)