Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Planning ahead

I signed up for NaBloPoMo, which I'm looking forward to. I briefly considered doing NaNo again, but decided that a concerted effort into working on the novel I wrote last November would probably be a better use of my time. A blog post every day: that I can do. It'll help add some content here, which will be good because Typepad, it turns out, is a vengeful bitch when scorned, and made all of the archives of my old blog vanish immediately when I cancelled service. I don't care especially — I was after a fresh start, after all — but if I had known they were going to wipe me off the face of the internet, I would have printed out a few posts first. And maybe left the "hey, I'm starting a new blog — email me for the link!" post up for a few days so more than three people would see it. But not being prone to vengeance myself, I never considered the possibility.

I'll pull up the cached pages of the recipes I want to save and put them up on the other blog over the next couple of weeks.

But because the universe seeks balance and sometimes my life is highly entertaining, I got to tag along as the plus one for a friend who does some freelance celebrity reporting. She was covering a swanky charity event at the kind of very cool venue neither of us would ever be at otherwise on a Monday night: free champagne, burlesque performers in vintage lingerie, big bowls of jellybeans, excellent people watching, and a vaudeville-style show that included a sexy Circe de Soleil-ish performance by two guys in Batman and Robin costumes set to "On the Wings of Love," a simulation of oral sex performed more or less by giant puppets, a world-class double-dutch team (seriously, they were doing handsprings while jumping rope) and a duet of "You Don't Bring Me Flowers Anymore" between Alan Cumming and some guy whose hair was shaped into horns. I know it sounds like a fever dream, but it's all true.

Otherwise, I've pretty much been hanging out at home and knitting. I think working so steadily on the wedding shawl reprogrammed my brain somehow — I've been a lot less interested in flitting between projects than in applying myself to some of the ones I have in progress and finishing them up. First I'm going to get through the Pimlico shrug, mostly because I've renewed the book as many times as I can at the library and don't particularly want to buy it, but also because I really like it and want to have it around. I just have to finish half of one sleeve and add a couple of inches to the body. Then I'll put it together and do the ribbing about the opening. I know it's kind of worthless without pictures, but our ghetto internet set-up wasn't working this morning and I couldn't email myself any photos.

At the same time, I've also been looking through my stacks of knitting magazines and making notes about what I want to make from them so I can match some of them up with yarn I already have and plan ahead for what I want to make next. Forgive the dismal quality of these pictures; I had intended them to just be for my notes. I put where the project can be found under each photo. I do this every year or so and it's always interesting to see the themes that emerge when I mark potential projects. I love this part, mulling over endless possibilities.

We have long cardigans:
VK Fall/Winter 1986

VK Fall 1989

VK Fall 1989

Lavold book 1

Jaeger book JB20 — I marked a LOT of cardigans with this general shape, but this seemed like the best-fitting and most nicely constructed.

And then there are cabled pullovers:
VK Fall 1994

VK Fall 2007 — not cabled, but enough texture that I'll give it a pass

Interweave Knits Fall 2003 — this is a dead ringer for an old J. Crew sweater I wore to shreds. I've always meant to recreate it...

There are more here, but these are the ones I was interested in enough at this moment to pull into the post.

1 comment:

Ashley said...

Omg that event sounds outrageously fun. Were you able to take pictures, or did you have to hang low as to seem like you always get to attend such events?

I've been ruminating about NaBloPoMo as well and just might have to bite the bullet. It doesn't sound hard until you have a Sunday that you did nothing but watch tv. :)

That's awful about typepad, btw. I can't believe that happened!