Sunrise Sunset

Remember that scene in everyone's favorite, the ultimate, original boytoy movie, The Outsiders, where Cherry Valance runs into Pony Boy, and there's a beautiful Francis Ford Coppola sunset framing her red hair, and a Stevie Wonder theme song swelling in the background? And she reminds Ponyboy of that poem - Nature's First Green is Gold, her hardest hue to hold, and yadda yadda yadda - and then she asks him, "Can you see the sunset from your side of town?" And Ponyboy nods, "well, you can see it from my side too," and she bounces back into her snobby soc world, leaving him with Soda Pop and the boys at the gas station? Well, here is the Sunrise on my side of town. Not quite the Kate Gilbert creation, but I love it, and I'm so pleased with the finished project. As you can see, I went with the funky shaped buttons. I liked the ellipse/cat's eye buttons that got the most reader response, but, because I went with a very different yarn, something very me, and I wanted to keep that feel to my jacket.

As I mentioned before, I totally screwed up the hem - my hem is half the size it's supposed to be because I didn't follow the directions (I think I've mentioned I don't drive - good idea, eh?), and between the Silk Garden, and the smaller hem, I think my jacket is much drapier than it would have been had I hemmed it properly. Also, I wear a size 36 bra, so I went with the jacket sized for 37" - I've been pretty successful by going with a medium with most patterns. If I had hemmed properly, and lost another inch on each side, I think it would have come out too small. So, for anyone thinking about making this jacket, as painful as it might be, I would err on the side of too big, as opposed to too small - because as we all know by now, I am gauge challenged, but I heavily blocked this to the schematic in the pattern, and it's the right size for the 37.

So, I can check this off my knitting queue. Just in time to get a few wearings in before the weather completely changes. I think making April 1st Show Your Stash day was enlightened - because it certainly had something to do with fools, fiber and frivolity. After bouncing from blog to blog looking at everyone's stash, I realized - I do not have a stash. That catalogue below - not stash. And, again, it goes back to that drug business analogy that I cannot get away from. As I've mentioned before, dealers deal from a "stash," and if the stash is a certain weight, they get mandatory jail sentences. In order to get them out of the mandatory jail sentence, we do what's a hearing, where we call an expert (yes, there are actually experts in drug dealing, just as there are expert's in car accident cases, malpractice cases, etc.) to divide the stash into personal use and actual sale. If the personal use portion is subtracted from the total, and brings it under the mandatory weight - no mandatory sentence. That folks, is my stash - complete personal use. The stashes I saw on line, could never ever in a million years be consumed in a lifetime. Beautiful, stunning, worth bathing in (see Knit and Tonic), enviable, addictive - but for me, well, I'll never be looking at state time based on my pititful closet of unused fiber.