Chaos Attraction

Stitches West

2018-02-26, 10:45 p.m.

On Saturday I went to go see "The King And I" at San Jose Broadway. Usually I don't think of myself as being super into this show, but it was very good. It's definitely a study of personality contrasts, where the king and Anna are alike (into science and developments and growing and stubbornness) vs. well, not (King being spoiled as shit and always getting his way). I was thinking about it for a while afterwards.

On Sunday I went to Stitches West, where I met up with Meg. That was delightful to get to hang out with her and inform her of what's gone on in the last few months. She bought more than I did. I decided NOT to go buy more fingering yarn because I don't like to work with tiny thin yarn and I still haven't figured out what to do with it from last year. This ended up meaning that I didn't buy any yarn at all since 90% of the yarn there any more is fingering. I used to be able to buy a lot of nice worsted in bulk, but those vendors don't seem to be around any more.

The whole thing seems geared to those who only make socks and shawls from tiny yarn any more. Which of course is because (a) you don't so much have to care about fit and size if it's socks and shawls, and (b) it's a lot cheaper to buy one thin yarn skein and work on a project that will take you months or years to work on. Unfortunately, my feet are hot and I hate having to wear socks and I cannot figure out how the hell to wear shawls when not in formalwear, so I don't want to do those. I am not their audience.
Anyway, I ended up buying a magazine, a few pins, and some roving, but that was about it. It was a poor lot to show off to the yarnies come Monday night's knitting group.

In other news, I was trying to make a skirt with suspenders for the Ravellenic Games (note: you start and finish a project during the course of the Olympics). Nobody on Ravelry has made this pattern before, which is perhaps a bad sign. It was a mix of bulky yarn and worsted, and I thought hey, I can use my handspun stash! However, the project needed a lot of finessing and resizing it down and I kept pulling it all out and starting it all over again multiple times. I was about 80% done on Saturday night but knew it wasn't gonna get finished, so I gave up. I finished it Monday night at knitting group but then it just looked sad. Mostly because the pattern had the same gauge for the chunky yarn as it did for the worsted, and that did not look right when the project was finished. Worsted yarn really shouldn't be worked with size 11 needles, y'all... it needs to be about 8 at the biggest or else it gets gappy and weird, which it did here.

I think I can redo this pattern idea but better, so I'm redoing it all with worsted and resized the gauge. So far it is going better. It's all in green this time and I am hoping it gets done by St. Patrick's Day, but I doubt I'll manage that. But it would go great with the new shirts I just ordered for the holiday.


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