Best Quote I Heard All Day
"There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action." --Johann von Goethe

How rare! And how true!

And I continue my fight for truth, justice and against the American way of not paying attention to anything half the time.

Wakey, Wakey
And so I dozed off for an hour and a half waiting for Achim to call me back. And so he did. And now I am wide awake. Blogward! (With no apologies whatsoever to Meg S.)

Alice Starmore Redux
For lo unto 2 years, this Grand Avenue vest has been festering in my tapestry knitting bag (not to be confused with the 823 other knitting bags that I own). It's about 32 rounds short of body completion. And then, of course, there is the year's worth of finishing ahead of me. Gack. But having almost completed a pair of socks and having done nothing much bigger since my left hand became 40% numb, I decided to get moving and finish the damned thing. And of course, having a circular needle row counter reminded me I was on Row 7 of the chart...except I have no idea where I am vis a vis the neck decreases.

Sigh.

Now I'll have to figure THAT out.

Knitting Engineering
It occurred to me at some point tonight, I don't know when, that I am terribly attracted to engineer-types. My late husband Jimmy was a fine mechanical engineer and all-around superlative logical thinker. My current interest is also an engineer. I've worked with tons of engineers during my stint as a technical writer and befriended most of them, male and female.

As a child, I was considered very creative by my family because I wrote poetry and short stories from the age of 8. But once I found knitting, I realized that it was the very symmetry, the logic, and the geometry of knitting (plus crafting something from nothing) that appealed to my right brain (or is it the left? I forget which is creative, which is logical).

There's nothing more exciting to me than working out design concepts, working out the pitfalls ahead of time, developing the directions and then writing the whole mess out. And then executing my design plan. I've learned a lot about processes and procedures from doing this. It's why I write P&P for a living and it's a direct result of my years doing directions of all sorts, from technical manuals for solenoid valves for the Navy to knitting directions to ISO stuff.

I'd druther be a knitting design engineer than almost anything.

Who says technical can't be creative? I don't believe the two are mutually exclusive at all.

And marrying texture, color, and fiber with the logic of knitting is my idea of contentment and soothes my left brain-right brain.

How handy!