Ah, Friday night. So much dynamic urban action to partake of. So little energy. Honestly, how often do we end up just vegetating at home, maybe watching a movie? Instead, we could all be knitting at Yarnivore! And that’s exactly what Lisa and I did last night. First we made a pit stop at The Point after work. Here’s our favorite kitty at the little deli around the corner, and Lisa knitting her Lara:

It was quite the little odyssey trekking out to Brooklyn to find Yarnivore. Myrtle Plaza is full of random sculptures. Lisa has more thorough coverage, but here are the highlights:

It’s Bambi’s hip hop cousin BlingBling, rhinestone-encrusted from antler to tail, cavorting in the ivy! And it’s me with the helpful guide dog after BlingBling’s overwhelming rainbow blingyness temporarily blinded me.

But we did find Yarnivore, and the fabulous Rose made us feel very welcome. Out came the wedding stole, and she was happy to make new friends:

Here’s Joy, helping to show off the stole in all her five feet of glory. It’s thanks to Joy and Kaitlyn that we knew about the Yarnivore meet-up: we were all at the same table at the Yarn Harlot event, and Lisa found their blogs afterwards. What fun to make new knitting friends!

Here’s what I did this weekend, besides a few rows on Lara and the wedding stole:

I bet you thought I’d forgotten all about poor Lightning, didn’t you? In fact, she has been tugging sorely at my conscience, so I pulled her out again on Sunday. I picked up my place in the pattern fairly easily and happily started knitting away. Lightning grows pretty quickly on the size 11 Addi turbos. But alas, I had forgotten that you have to increase an extra-pattern stitch on every RS row during the waist shaping, or the pattern decreases itself and suddenly you’ve got waist shaping for an Oompah Loompah with the proportions of Betty Boop. (A Boompah Loompah?) Anyway, once I’d frogged forty-five minutes’ work and begun again, counting more carefully and diligently increasing, Lightning proceeded to slap me upside the head again and again. Really, if I had become guilty of any knitterly hubris, Lightning smacked it right out of me. Four times I got to the point where I should have had 39 stitches back on the needles, only to find I had 38. Frog, frog. Tink tink tink. And let’s not forget the three times I ripped back because I realized I’d screwed up the pattern. My new mantra? That which does not kill me makes me a better knitter.

But at last, Lightning’s second front piece is up to the armhole and ready for…more shaping! And then there are the sleeves… This will be a hard-won sweater. But I’ve learned a whole lot from it, and when the time comes, this will be one seaming job I shall undertake with utter joy.

I think it may have been the pink and blue stitch markers I borrowed from Lisa that got me to thinking how much my Lara sleeve looked like it was sprouting fallopian tubes after I cast on the body stitches:

The uterus effect was clearer if I folded the sleeve under a bit; in reality it’s a pretty long sleeve. I decided to make the small size sweater for a closer fit, but lengthen the body and arms to reflect my proportions. I’m 5’11”, after all, and an 18″ sweater body might look a little silly. Even the 20″ I’m shooting for will produce a slightly cropped jacket. As Lisa pointed out, 18″ on my long torso might look like I made an oversized shrug. And since I need Mia to be talking to me six weeks from now when she’s a bridesmaid in my wedding, we wouldn’t want it to appear that I’ve become a knitter of shrugs! 😉

This photo also shows a strange inconsistency in the second ball of yarn: apparently a few strands of a slightly darker green colorway got mixed in when this ball was spun, producing that odd striping you see on the forearm. It’s really quite subtle – I didn’t even notice it until after I’d knit that section, and even then I thought I’d managed to brush my WIP against something dirty. But it really is in the yarn. It doesn’t bother me much. After all, one of my favorite pages in the Yarn Harlot’s bookbookbook is 106, which reads: “Knitting is a human activity. It’s okay if it looks like a human did it.”

As I photographed my diagram of the uterus, I found myself daydreaming about a world in which yarn really could reproduce. Wouldn’t it be heavenly to wake up one morning and find that your stash had given birth to more adorable little balls of yarn? But it seemed more likely that my bright green knitted reproductive system would produce this:

…I’m making this:

I know, I know… I really shouldn’t be starting any new projects right now. But the wedding stole is in remarkably good shape: I still plan to complete a repetition every week until the wedding, but even if I only did four more it would technically be long enough. And I did finish the honeymoon tank, and I wound my second ball of yarn for Clapotis and worked on her this evening. (While watching Seabiscuit to get myself psyched up for the Kentucky Derby this weekend! The Derby, after all, marks the one year anniversary of our engagement, and that’s worth celebrating. I’ll be making mint syrup for the juleps on Friday night. Send crushed ice!) My mother hasn’t measured my father for his gansey yet, so I can’t start work on that beyond making some basic decisions about the pattern. I know poor Lightning is being miserably neglected, but I can’t wear her until next fall anyway, unless we get some remarkably cold weather this summer. Hence the new cardi.

This is Lara, from the Debbie Bliss Alpaca Silk book. It’s all Lisa’s fault that I’ve been suckered into this. But it’s such a simple knit – great for the subway and for manuscript reading, at least until I have to cast on a million stitches for the body. Lara is knit horizontally, from one sleeve cuff to the other, so in the middle I suspect she’s going to get a little unwieldy. But I’m so deeply in love with my yarn that I don’t mind. Lisa and I are not big fans of the Alpaca Silk, so we both decided to substitute. She’s using Mission Falls 1824 Wool; I’m using the cotton. And what fabulous cotton it is. It’s my favorite shade of green (more lettuce-y than it appears on screen), and everything I said about it in the post below really is true. You should all run out and get some before it’s gone forever. My only quibble is the yardage, which isn’t very generous: I do not love weaving in ends. But I’m not complaining – it’s worth it for this yarn. And I love the way my first sleeve is coming out. So if you missed last year’s Lara Along, feel free to jump on our little late-to-the-party bandwagon! Really, with only two people, it’s more of a Radio Flyer. But didn’t those rock?