Happy September 29!

I MADE IT!

I went two solid months without casting a new thing on. Not socks. Not slippers. Not hats or scarves or mittens or sweaters or vests.
Not.
One.
Thing.

*snoopy dance*

And of course, I celebrated by casting on two things.












This is some pink worsted-to-bulky wool which has been marinating in my stash for, um, well, let's see.
*gets out calculator*
*performs complex math*

Yeah. Forfreakinever. That's how long. 13 skeins, 87 yards each, taking up a lot of space. All I ever wanted to do with this was a simple stockinette vest. No frills. Just knitting.

So I cast it on, and with a gauge of 4 stitches to the inch on size 10s, it whips up quick. That's about 2.5" of the back, knit this morning while I loafed for as long as it took to watch last night's Mad Men episode on demand. (Roger's an ass. I hate Jane. Pete is mean.)

This project will live on my desk for a while. Here's my theory on this one. I've been keeping plain socks on my desk, and socks in my purse as my travel knitting. With only one sock OTN now (woo hoo!), I'll carry that in my purse and leave some other plain, simple knitting on my desk to work while I dictate revision letters and read slush. And I need to clear out drawer space currently occupied by this pink wool. Hence, a new desk knitting project is born.

But you know what I've really been longing to cast on....
---drumroll----

The Kyoto!












Oh, baby, how gorgeous is that. Look at that sheen, that halo. I think I'm in luuuuuurve. This yarn feels like a dream.

I cast on the sleeve, ignoring the directions -- well, not ignoring them precisely. More like, I looked at them, said, "Nope. Not doing it that way," and cast on something different. So I did pay enough attention to the directions to decide to throw them out. That's not exactly ignoring, is it?

Right. Semantics. Now that I've knit three inches of the cuff, I reckon I'd better go figure out what I'm doing here. I don't want to get caught in my usual cycle, which as we know goes like this:

1. Scorn the pattern with much harrumphing.
2. Knit blithely without doing any math or planning.
3. Realize what a disaster I'm making.
4. Keep knitting anyway.
5. Realize the disaster is failing to magically self-correct.
6. Frog it.
7. Do just enough bad math to have to repeat these steps indefinitely.

But not with this yarn. This yarn has a high mohair content. I'd forgotten what that meant until I started knitting with it this afternoon. So now that I've remembered, three inches into my knitting-on-the-fly highwire act, I'm going to pause and redraw the pattern and calculate my increases, and all that good stuff, and then I'm going to double and triple and quadruple check my numbers, because DANG it I DO NOT WANT TO RIP THIS BACK. EVER.

(Bonus points to anyone who remembers those pink needles.)
(No, I haven't found my addis yet.)