Best Quote I Heard All Day
I can win an argument on any topic, against any opponent. People know this, and steer clear of me at parties. Often, as a sign of their great respect, they don't even invite me.--Dave Barry

At least I get invites--two parties this weekend, one yesterday, one in about 3 hours.

I don't argue at parties.

The Archives
They're back. I finally begged Blogger to help me, after months of tearing my hair out trying in vain to get the links to work. Geeks are good, you know?

I just want to say, Steve from Blogger not only got the job done in less than 12 hours, he sent me an e-mail immediately to tell me that they were all back.

So then I had the non-pleasure of going back and reading some of my early blogs. Ye Gods. You should never read shit you wrote 2 years ago.

Pathetic. Really. But I do think I've improved.

Do the Twist
The above heading will ring some aged bells in some aged heads, no doubt. I could rename my living room The Peppermint Lounge. (Anyone who comments about this will immediately reveal their age to be 50+.)

As I have said, I have QJ to thank for getting me back into spinning. I finished up the Romney yesterday, although in my wretched novicehood, it dawned on me that I have neither spun it finely enough to give me a fingering weight when plied double nor do I probably have enough of said yarn to knit a pair of socks. But it did come out quite nicely, I thought.

There's a bit more of the magenta hidden, but the dye is predominantly shades of blue. It will be interesting to see it plied up.

I did have some other handpainted roving; however, this wool (marked "domestic" on the tag) has a bit of mauvish-brown in it. I had thought to ply it with the Romney. Now I'm not sure.

I also have 4 ounces of this. Loopy, my spinning mentor, who knows far more than I, agreed with me when I wrote her saying I thought that the 4 ozs. of Romney should have spun up to more than a bobbin and a half. I have a McMorran scale somewhere that I need to dig out so I can get an idea of the yardage.

In the meanwhile, there's a nifty gadget from Nancy's Knick Knacks that I think I'll get ASAP. It's a yarn meter, and while it does not measure yards, just feet, I don't find that a problem. NKK also makes a fine WPI tool that looks worth having.

Why a Knitted Bikini Bra Looks Like Shit on Most People
You know why.

The greater question, and one that was more or less asked in the Comments from the last entry, is what looks good on what body type. (Dana asked a very good question, which I'll get to in the next entry: How do you decide which size of a design to make? That is, how do you guess how much ease a pattern designer intended a garment to have, and/or what will look flattering?)

David wanted to know about raglans. Only if you're reasonably thin. I presume that David doesn't have the bustiness issue. I do. I don't knit raglans for myself, although I enjoy making them. Liz, my rail-thin granddaughter, is just the person in my family who can wear raglans. My brother, who never wears sweaters, much to my mother's chagrin, is thin and could wear them.

Garment type for body type is a topic that is worth discussing in some length. However, I'll save that for the book. Nonetheless, although thin people have "issues" with certain garment styles, knitted garments, much like the TV camera, tend to add heft to your girlish/boyish figure, thus we well-built peeples need to think about what looks good on us.

Drop-shoulder sweaters, while easy to do and ubiquitous in magazines and pattern books, have a bad habit of bunching at the non-shaped armholes. And that's why. There's no shaping to the armholes. Of course, I'm just as guilty as the next Chubster of wearing them on occasion.

But no one, no matter what the body type, can go wrong with a fully shaped garment. And by that, I mean fully-fashioned sleeves and their accompanying shaped armscyes. Most people's fitting problems begin at the chest. That's a given.

In short, this is why I've been touting Veronik Avery's Threepenny Pullover from this issue of IK. It's beautifully shaped, with vertical lines (yes, horizontal lines will make you look heavier, no matter what you think).

Loop is insistent that I once again do the Gallery of Ghastlies when I return from Stitches East in October. I will. It would seem that many people do have a severe problem in knitting something that flatters their body type.

Of course, you can make a sweater whose shape looks fine on you...but whose huge intarsia pattern of a cat draped over the shoulder, with 3-D tail waving in the wind, diminishes the overall fashionable effect, ya know, hey?

Just because you can knit it doesn't mean that you should wear it.

I've got just enough time to do some quick spinning and then it's off to see and be seen at the next party.

Being rare and handy means not arguing at parties. Here's hoping that this is not a Republican crowd.