You girls rock. You all are the picture of support and encouragement. Forced to look past the intial crap crap of the project with your encouragement I have looked to the bright-side.

The other side that is. Not bad for a first-timer, eh? Catholic girls start much too late.

I’ll focus on the details of the crap crap later. I tried a few different graphing methods, I had missed the Knitty article. Thank you for the recommendations. I first tried KnitPro, initially seen on el Masono y la Dixona (huge thanks to Kay and Kellee who helped me track down the long forgotten link.) Problem with this – I couldn’t get the size I wanted AND there was a lot of gray matter in the way. The gray matter is the hard part. I couldn’t quite get my head to figure out if the edges of the letters, shades of gray, should be stitched or not.

From there I went to gauge specific graph paper (a bow to Colleen who keeps this stuff on her website, so I don’t have to.) Layering this over a printed out “bookish” on the window (pictured yeterday) proved to be the ticket to ride. Surprisingly this worked out the best. I stitched from this chart, make split second judgements on the fly with yarn in hand. I wronged myself there. Alas, I think I have all the letters worked to my liking. I just have to rip the whole damn think and put a stitch or two between the letters. That and add a bit of size to the whole thang.

What I learned:

1 – Intarsia isn’t too hard. It’s a pain in the ass. It takes forever. You’re bound to strangle yourself in the tangles. But it isn’t the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Like lace. Intarsia I can get a breath in every few minutes. Lace. Well, lace may cause me to smoother myself.
2 – Get bobbins for your yarn (see #1)
3 – Don’t spend an entire day on one word. You will begin to see a ghost kissing a fish while convincing yourself that the word really is spelled B-O-O-K-I-S-H.
4 – Next time the husband picks a nickname for me remind him that, in the supreme act of dorkiness, I will most likely end up knitting it on something. This fact should really weigh heavily on the heart of his imagination. Maybe D-O-R-K would have done? It’s shorter.

How do you spell relief from a knitting headache?

Jeeves and Will Shortz. (see #4 above)

The Random Number Table has spoken. I closed my eyes, swirled my cursor across the screen and*** number 40 come on down***. The 40th comment on the Boookish post is Ms. Kay. Kay – email me (bookishwendy at that fabulous place known as gmail dot come) your address and I’ll send you a package.

All I can stay is that you all are whore’s for a Star. I haven’t gotten the official count in but it looks as though C was the wiener. The font name is “Eight-track”. H and F – whose font names I’ll have to add later – were not far behind the count.

I’ve started graphing and swatching (read: spending a whole day teaching myself intarsia, only to knit the entire word into the actual t-shirt in order to come to the realization that there is plenty of “room for improvement”.) I hate room for improvement. It harkens memories of classrooms with brightly colored walls and snot-filled kids with a teacher who is just an inch this side of sanity, enough to know that, “Better luck next time” isn’t an appropriate response to a shitty job.

I think I have the style of the font translated into the stitches. The first problem is size, they need to be a bit bigger. The second problem is spacing – they are way too close together. I thought about embroidering a border around each letter. I even tried it. Better luck next time.

I can’t say I’m loving the process. I did at first. I thought about putting up a little tutorial. It just takes so damn long. It’s difficult for me to breath right while stitching the letters. I forget to take a breath. It’s really not good for the mental health. I’ll have to go into training before I start again. Dive school or something.

Oh, I may have or may not have gone shopping for a certain Bookish Contest.

Weiner announced tomorrow.