I told you I couldn’t resist swatching all that sock yarn, once I had the idea to make a Confectionary Vest rather than a Confectionary Tank, remember?

I thought this stitch pattern might be a chore, with those extended-slipped-crossed stitches, but it turns out it’s addictive. (Hence my swatch is twice as tall as it needs to be.) I’m still playing with the arrangement of the colors, but it feels like painting, and it’s extraordinarily satisfying. Can you picture it as a vest, with some 2-color corrugated ribbing for trim? I think it might be just the thing for next fall.

I won’t start knitting it before then, unfortunately. I’m creeping up on the completion of my secret Shibui project, and the Ivy stole will be finished in ten days if I have to stay up nights to do it, but then it’s going to be full steam ahead with my secret Popknits project and the Indigo Ripples Skirt. I really should take a swing at finishing my three-year-old Frost Flowers pullover, and then there’s that bag of Cashcotton 4-Ply in the stash suddenly begging to be an Apres-Surf Hoodie. Not to mention all the babies hitting the ground in August and needing little sweaters for the fall. What’s a girl to do, especially when she’s got sewing projects tempting her, too? Resist buying yellow and white and gray and black fabric for this (thanks a lot, Alison) or this (it was the embroidered bicycles that sent me over the edge), for starters.

A week ago, Claudia threw down and announced a pledge to replace at least one car trip per week with a bicycle trip. That’s just the kind of challenge I can get excited about, since I have 1. a conscience, 2. a body that could use a little more exercise, and 3. a meager salary that doesn’t go far at the gas pump these days. She’s calling the effort Bicycles As Transportation / Knitters for Alternative Transportation: BAT/KAT. So Mondays are now BAT update days.

On Friday night, Mr. G and I pedaled down to our favorite theater for a $3 movie, pizza, and microbrew (we love Portland). Some Like It Hot was playing, and I’m happy to report that it’s still a delightful date movie 50 years after it was filmed. Saturday I rode to the yarn store to meet Katrin instead of driving, while Mr. G cycled to the annual giganticus tech-entrepreneur-geekfest known as Bar Camp. And yesterday we took the bikes when we went to meet Mr. G’s dad for dinner. That’s three BATs apiece: they’re all within two or three miles of home, exactly the range where we’d be most tempted to hop in the car, but the bike trip takes only a minute or two longer. We also walked for the groceries all week and took the MAX train when we went shopping for a purple tie for Mr. G to wear to my brother’s wedding. Since my job requires me to drive over 30 miles on weekdays (I carpool, but I still hold myself responsible for the environmental impact of the trip), I like to leave the car in the driveway all weekend whenever possible.

Now I feel like I need a marvy little sidebar BAT/KAT tally graphic. Too bad I don’t have skills like that.

And the knitting? The Ivy stole has crawled up to row 26 of the edge chart. I’m halfway there, except that the rounds are still getting longer. I don’t think I could conscionably use the word excruciating to describe knitting cashmere (hey, how has unconscionable survived in our lexicon but conscionable is obsolete? Add it to the list with words like wieldy and whelmed, I guess), but this edging is like the last 2.2 miles of a marathon. Why, Skacel, why can’t you make a #0 Addi LacePoint? What daft manager signed off on a plan to make #1s and #00s but nothing in between? I may have cast on an Indigo Ripples skirt for some much-needed stockinet on #5s.

The Ivy stole edging is a marathon, not a sprint, or even a mid-length training run. I’m on row 19 of 50, and those rounds are getting longer and longer - something in the neighborhood of 1700 stitches at this point. It takes me a standard-length movie to do two rounds; a showing of Planet Earth New Zealand (aka The Fellowship of the Ring) the other night was good for a whopping 3.5 (it would go a little faster if Addi would make the Lace Points in the size and length I need). I just ran out of the second ball of ArtYarns Cashmere I - thank goodness I had the foresight to pick up a third skein of the same dyelot when I noticed the new shipment at Knit/Purl was a slightly different shade! It’s pointless to show you pictures of my progress: the edging is picked up on a 47″ US #0 needle, so all there is to see is a big scum of lavender froth with stitch markers around the edge.

I’m almost done with a secret project for Shibui, so naturally my mind has wandered to what’s next. I’ve got something in the hopper for Popknits that I’m very excited to cast on, and I’ve been mulling over possibilities for the new Casbah. The confluence of the new Interweave Knits summer issue with Megan’s post about knitting cowls with doubled sock yarn turned on a light.

Look at all the complementary sock yarn I already have in the stash! Counterclockwise from the left, that’s Socks That Rock Lightweight in Amber and Mica, Dream in Color Smooshy in Gothic Rose, Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock in Cedar, Socks That Rock Lightweight in one of the colorways with rock names they don’t seem to offer anymore, and of course the Casbah. All mostly superwash merino. Of course, a worsted-weight wool tank top makes no sense. But what if I shortened the body of the Confectionary Tank and wore it as a vest next fall? I couldn’t help myself. I started swatching.

The design-minded among you will notice that the sidebar’s looking a little less scraggly. I owe Mr. G for this. You’ll also see there’s a link to his company website: one of the reasons I knit so much is that my partner for social activities is pouring all his energy into launching a small business. I think you can only know what an effort that requires if you’ve actually done it yourself. We certainly didn’t comprehend what we were in for when we took the decision for Mr. G to leave his job to work on SweetSpot full time. We saw a need within his family for better communication about his father’s diabetes; we saw that Adam had the skills and the passion to do something about it and to extend the project to other families in the same situation. He’d wanted to start a company of his own for years, and we thought now was probably the time to try: we don’t have kids, I have a job, we have some savings put by to cushion us for a year or two. Neither of us fully imagined the emotional drain, or the way every conversation we have would turn to the business, or the frustration of trying to bring in the support and relationships necessary to sustain a worthy one-man project. But SweetSpot is out in the world now, and if you or someone you care for lives with insulin-dependent diabetes, you might find that Mr. G’s service can help in the daily work toward wellness. It fetches, stores, and analyzes information from blood glucose monitors, and it offers a teamwork structure to make family participation simpler and more constructive. It’s free to try it out, and if you have any questions, the CEO himself will take your call in his handknit socks. How many companies can say that?

Who knew it would be so difficult to arrange strips of fabric in a seemingly random yet balanced manner? This is not the kind of skill I’ve had a chance to develop through knitting, although if I neglected my poor Gee’s Bend meets Mason Dixon blanket a little less, I might get more practice.

Exhibits 1 and 5 were the clear favorites, with 1 pulling ahead late in the race. (The social scientist in me wonders if this didn’t have something to do with them being the first and last options, and whether they would have gotten as much love if they’d been in the middle of the group.) Actually, they were my favorites, too. And you all made me think harder about what exactly appealed to me about each one.

Number 1:

This one has the most overt balance, I think: the diagonal parallel shift of the pink flowers and brown polka dot short strips; the strong Amy Butler browns spaced wide like columns; even distribution of lights and darks, with the lights forming a capital N if you squint at them. What bugged me: the Butlers being the same height, and the short strips along the top being equal in stubbiness.

Number 5:

I liked the energy of this arrangement, the way my eye had to move over the composition. But ultimately it was, perhaps, a little too unsettling. Plus, using the squinting trick, there’s a vast past expanse at the lower center with no dark mass to counterbalance it. This is where I got to thinking that the lower edge might look funny with a dark binding.

I also realized I probably need a ninth strip for width if I want the thing to be square.

So I went back to the drawing board. I looked in Bend the Rules again and realized that Amy Karol’s version staggers the short strips in the middle of the long ones, as I did with the pink flowers in version 5. So I thought I might give that idea more thought. I also realized I’d forgotten what I was drawn to in Moonstitches’s pleasing sheets: the horizontal continuity she achieves by varying the width of the strips and keeping those with large patterns in the order they were cut from the cloth. That ability for the eye to slide sideways across the quilt gives it order, I think. Most of my fabrics don’t have a pattern that you’d notice repeating horizontally, but the Amy Butler does. I thought I’d try making use of it.

This time I’ve tried to reduce the chaos by reducing the number of darks on lights and vice versa. Seeing it on screen, I think I might make a further change: slide the brown polka dot interrupter up the Amy Butler background strip, and move the pale twiggy one down the green strip next to it. Swap them visually, so that the brown polka dots stay together and offset the pink florals diagonally, sort of as in version 1.

What do you think?

And yeah, I’m just gonna sew the dog hair right in.