Life's ironies & sleeveless in San Diego

Weight loss realities -- the first person to notice that you're approaching your goals will be someone who makes you skin crawl and not in any good way.

Studio straightening realities -- you can spend an entire day reorganising and working on the room and, to the casual observer, it will still look like total chaos.

Heather's headache realities -- on any day when all I really need is sleep, peace and quiet there will be a work crew in a location where the noise is inescapable.

I had every good intention of making it down to The Bonita Knitting Store yesterday for their Sunday social knit and a chance to catch up with Tania and perhaps get a bit of advice on the pentagon sleeves project.

Making that plan even more attractive is the proximity of the shop to Da Kine's South Bay and some take away pig, kalua. Great plan but the cold put the kibosh on it. This cold is decidedly not something I'd care to share with others so I just stayed home, knit and napped.

The cold is still winning and Kali's sympathetic noises are borderline enough to make me want to strangle her. I do not do sick well.

When the noise of the work crew made me give up hope of sleep, I took water, aspirin and a stoic spirit to the long over due studio straightening task. I'm tackling one room at a time in the hopes restoring something that approaches order (or at least controlled chaos) so anyone crazy enough to check in on Kali while I'm out of town will come back a 2nd day.

I "finished" the body of the pentagon sleeves project last night. I finally decided on a nice wide neckline that I'm still deciding how to finish.

I'm leaning toward my original roll neck solution but I'm not wed to it. I did a 3-needle bind off of the shoulders.

I finished it, tried it on, put it on a hanger and hung it in the hallway so I could study it as I walked by.

The blending makes it looks a bit corrugated but I'm confident that it will even out once laundered.

Just as is, it reminds me of a very well loved cotton shell I had many years ago so I'm pleased with the basic shape. I know that I'll like the fit even better when I'm smaller but I'm really quite well pleased with the thing.

I bit the bullet and frogged back the top inch or so of each of the sleeves and blended the two dye lots.

I think I can live with leaving both the polygons and the short row shaping in a single dye lot but since I'm considering binding off the live sleeve stitches through the body front & back, I felt that blending would be a more harmonious choice.

More on the sleeves. One totally rocks my world. It does everything I want it to do, I know exactly how to extend it, to size it, to change it out for the "for publication" options -- it is just the bomb. The other one wants a little more work/thought and now I find myself back to wondering if I want asymmetrical sleeves or if my conventional streak (and frankly, practical side) is asserting itself to suggest that symmetrical might be a good first out option.

I have enough of the 1st dye lot yarn to do a 2nd "the bomb" sleeve and I'm really thinking about putting that on the needles and retaining the "needs work" sleeve to worry the design a bit more.

Speaking of worrying, once upon a time a long time ago, I had the task of indexing a couple of periodicals that had never been indexed. It wasn't all that fun and it was also in the pre-computer dark ages but I still believe that indexes are a very important part of any book.

So when I found that Nicky Epstein's Knitting on the Edge and Knitting Over the Edge books and the Vogue Stitchionary series didn't have indexes it bothered me. It bothered me enough to at least start to compile the same sort of spreadsheet that an early days Knitlister did of the Barbara Walker Treasuries. It isn't finished yet and if anyone want to compare notes and or help with the project, I'm open.

Since I've used Nicky's books most, right now I have the names, page numbers and which of the two books (On & Over) the pattern appears in. I'm working on adding the number of stitches, rows and direction of the knitting . It is slow going but even in its incomplete stage it has helped me figure out which book I saw something in.

I've been swatching the angel wings scallop edging from page 159 of knitting on the edge and I'm not sure whether I'm interpreting the pattern instruction correctly or not. It says to pick up and knit the 9th stitch of the previous scallop and I'm trying to figure out which stitch the 9th stitch is. The stitch count starts at 12 and grows to 42. My inclination is that I should be counting from left to right but I'm not 100% confident about that.