I’ve been rereading my Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books lately (and relistening to the radio series, and getting the Krikkit song stuck in my head for days, driving me mad, and OH GOD I AM A NERD). I have also been cursing my knitting.

The Fake-astanje Cardigan has been relegated to the yarn bin because it’s freaking June and I will knit summery things or die trying, dammit. Also because I don’t feel like knitting sleeves. The silk thing is pissing me off because it’s not perfect, and also because it doesn’t have a name yet. I don’t understand why inanimate objects won’t take some initiative and name themselves.

But never mind.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy presents the concept of a recipriversexcluson, which is a number that is defined as being anything but itself. Got it?

I’m not going to say that there is no purpose in gauge swatches. There is, but not the purpose one would expect. I’ve decided that my swatched gauge measurement is a recipriversexcluson. So it does give me some information, which is that whatever I think my gauge is, is exactly what it isn’t.

(No, I do not have a 27″ bust. This yarn grows a LOT after washing/blocking.)

I know that my gauge changes a bit between knitting flat and in the round, and I’m pretty sure I factored that in when I did all my fancy gauge math, so I can only assume that I am being foiled by Bistromathics. Which is very strange, given that I am not in a restaurant, and neither is the little notebook in which I wrote down my gauge info.

Another safe assumption would be that I should quit rereading my Hitchhiker’s books.

The silk thing is frustrating me, it really is. Apart from two of the skeins of yarn being completely different colours (can you tell in the pictures? If you can, I don’t want to hear about it LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU), and the total impracticality of 100% silk yarn (but it’s so purty), and the fact that I had to tink back in one little section three times because I used the wrong increase, then went back and did the right increase, then realized that the right increase was actually the wrong increase and I’d had it right in the first place, I… forget what I was going to say.

No, wait. The gauge stuff. Which is now erring on the side of “too big”, and so help me, I am going to have to cut a bitch if this thing is too big. Because that is the issue that plagues every damn knit garment I attempt, and I thought I finally had a good solid theory on sizing, which is “make it way too small, and it will somehow fit in the end”. I can only hope that I overestimated how much the yarn will grow, and… it will somehow fit in the end. Oy.

It is nice to be past the stockinette and well into the interesting bit, though.

We’ll see if I get around to actually knitting it… and writing up a program to generate charts for knitting its variations.

(Are you curious now?)