Fall Cable Fiasco: Dogfood or when Good Yarn goes Bad.

This was bad. Very bad. So bad that I avoided posting about it for nearly a week. I avoided facing the truth for even longer.

But first, a little history narrative for poetic balance. In our many years of living together one fact has been established: Both DH and I are intuitively very good cooks (owing in no small part to our mutual love of food and culinarily adventurous tastes). We both enjoy discovering new flavour principles and learning to apply them in making delicious and satisfying delights to seduce each other's palates and we continue to seek new and wonderful ways to prepare and enjoy food. We are true epicurean sensualists and proud of it.

However, it is only fair to admit, we have each on separate occasions taken perfectly good ingredients and concocted something so humanly inedible it should only be fed to the dog (if we had one). In short, we have each once (and happily only once) made dogfood. As there was no dog nor other creature present in our household who might be persuaded to consume the results of our horrible experiments, once the painful truth was reluctantly accepted by both chef and diner, these meals were regrettably consigned to the trash.

Well I can painfully report that I have now accomplished the same remarkable feat of ingenuity in a medium which has hitherto brought me only joy (with occasional periods of ennui during long stretches of stockinette, or frustration untangling a skein gone fubar, but I usually find even that soothingly meditative and satisfying).

Hello, my nom-de-blog is MezzoDiva and I have knitted dogfood. (Please interpolate appropriate 12-step program responses here).

I tried to ignore it but it wouldn't go away. I kept on knitting until the awful truth could no longer be denied. It was staring me in the face: a two-foot swath at least four feet long of beautifully cabled and drop-stitched D.O.G.F.O.O.D. I saw it coming after the first twelve inches of growth but I just winced and pretended it would all be okay.

You see, in my naivete I assumed that Beautiful pattern plus Beautiful Yarn plus Got Gauge must equal Beautiful Results. I forgot to account for such things as fibre content and structure, with their predictable consequences for drape or (in this case) lack thereof. A flowing design for a 50-50 wool-silk blend
will not somehow magically work out in a fabric knit from a beautiful but rather stiffish thick-thin single-ply 100%wool. Not. Gonna. Happen.

[... Sorry... I need a moment...]

Four balls of lovely Manos have been frogged into yarn-vomit and rewound. Maybe in two weeks or so I will knit it up into a nice quick scarf for my stepfather whose birthday occurs on New Years Day. The ten remaining unwound unused skeins will be returned/exchanged ASAP, either for very different colours or for other yarns altogether. I cannot bear to look at them. They offend my eyes. They broke my heart.

In happier knitting news, I am now swatching for the curvy cabled cardi using some beautiful Filtes King Extra 100% Merino Wool in Solid Red#2997 - I picked up 7 balls in the sale bin (bargoon) at Knitomatic yesterday, and I'm blissfully working on the scarf for the swap (scroll down) I'm doing with my new friend. We met yesterday at Knitomatic to finalize our plans, choose and purchase the yarns and after a couple of hours of informal SnB we took the materials home and tried not to drool over them.

She's crocheting a scarf for me like this one (scroll down) using three gorgeous colour of Lamb's Pride Bulky: deep fuschia, medium charcoal, and a heavy heathered lime - the colours set each other off beautifully, the soothing effect of the charcoal softening the dissonance of the fuschia and lime, and the brights zinging next to the sombre charcoal. I am knitting a Leaf Lace scarf for her in Cascade 220 colour 9453, a vibrant medium-toned purple with heathery effects of lilac and magenta. We held the yarns up next to her face yesterday and this one made her skin and features just glow! I heard from her earlier tonight and we're both already about 1/4 of the way done.

I'm also excited to report that I am in the early stages of designing a sock pattern (my very first own design, though really I am always tweaking and modifying my projects so much that they might all qualify to some degree). Please stay tuned for further notices regarding my sock-designing adventures. If it works out I will post the pattern here for you to enjoy. I might also ask for a small token fee which will be donated to charity - possibly connected to the walk to end breast cancer I'll be doing next fall. We'll see. It's probably premature to consider fees for a design that is not yet more than a gleam in my eye and has only just arrived on the drawing board.