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.