Knit and the City

It's 90 degrees - time to cast on a heavy wool sweater! Yeah!

I finished up the Manos test knitting (sort of, maybe - we'll see), and after knitting a gigantic sweater for someone else, I decided I needed a comfy sweater for me. So, I reached for the book I just bought, right - Custom Knits by Wendy Bernard? Or, perhaps I used the Green Mountain Spinnery yarn that I bought at MSW for Coraline. Hey, I have 12 balls of Rowan Cashsoft DK in the stash, for perhaps Lily from the new online magazine, Twist Collective. All of these new fantastic modern designs, and I went retro, Forecast, a 2005 design from Knitty.

I think it's the return of 90210, the Peach Pit, and the fabulously wealthy zipcode that spawned Melrose Place, that made me long for a puffy sleeve and perhaps a headband. Nostalgia for simpler times, simpler knits. But, alas, the Peach Pit is now a coffee bar, no big deal blow jobs in the parking lot have replaced should Donna go all the way with David, and this new family, eh, they're not the Walshes, and on the believability scale, these kids spent about as much time in Kansas as John McCain spent in Alaska. Times have changed, but the truth is, times were never "simpler," just different - and we have never thrived when we've had simple people, regardless of party affiliations, attempt to lead us.

So, I won't be adding a peplum to the bottom of my sweater, and I'll be throwing in some decreases to subtract from the puffy sleeve. And, I'll be leaving 90210, and returning to my Party of Five reruns, and the Salingers, a flawed family I can get behind, mom jeans and all.

And, speaking of flaws, I cast on this sweater on Saturday. On Sunday, I was ready to divide for the sleeve and the body. I put the body on scrap yarn, tried it on - yeah it fits, but but but - THERE'S A STRIPE OF STOCKINETTE 2 INCHES FROM THE CAST-ON!!!! The horror - unknit three repeats - a whole day's worth of knitting?!? Is it a flaw I can live with? We all have to decide what we can live with when we look in the mirror - some flaws become so inextricably linked with the fabric that it becomes a design element, something that makes it particularly, and tellingly homemade. Some flaws are so glarring, so unpalatable, that out they come.

This is the conversation I had with my dad today, a longtime registered Republican, as he tried to rationalize all of the flaws that are emerging about Sarah Palin. This nomination is so offensive to me on so many levels that whenever I think about it - I can't even see straight. To me, it is so outrageous, so unacceptable that this person who would throw women back to the time of cavemen (because since there's no evolution, cavemen must be a good thing), putting women in chastity belts as opposed to practicing responsible birth control, could be a heartbeat away from leading this nation (a nation that just a few years ago from which she would have happily seceded), that Roe v. Wade could be unraveled at the hands of a woman that I would have to refrain from speaking to my father if he cast his vote for her. As you can see from that last run on sentence, when I think of her, I sputter, and smoke comes out of my ears (not that smoking, or our wasteful energy practices have lead to global warming or anything like that because apparently that's a myth).

I don't know if it's my threat not to speak to him, or that truthfully, my fiscally conservative but basically civil rights oriented father could not look in the mirror knowing he had cast his vote against the polar bear is now voting Liberatrian. Go Bob Barr! I'm ok with that.

And, as you can see from the picture above, ripping out 2 days worth of knitting on a winter sweater in 90 degree heat was really a no brainer.