Vacationing Like I Mean it...

I thought this would be the summer of bloggling, but strangely it hasn't been, despite all the crafting that has been accomplished. I can't complain though, because the days have been filled with friends, family and travel. My mother came on Sunday to whisk me away to the lake to play while Mr. M completed a week of training. We sewed, we cooked (okay, mom cooked... I have to break this habit of expecting her to do all the work when she's around - really I can do more than cut up the vegetables for the salad!) we stuck our toes into the "freshly melted" lake water and went out for milkshakes at a place where the sign by the door says - "Don't talk about yourself - we'll do that when you leave." Later we picked up a chick flick - interesting in the "I have a degree in English which allows me to dissect anything too vapid to be entertained by" sort of way.

Our friends we were visiting live in a town that is so small that the little stores multitask to stay afloat. The video place at one end of town is also an ice cream shop - the video store at the other end does take-n-bake pizza. It cracks me up. Rural life is one of those special things that will always be with me. I'm no farm girl, but growing up in a little town in the richest wheat country in the world has rubbed off on me.

Being liberated from my household chores, I was able to make some more progress on Orangina. I offer this picture in the way of evidence that I am making some sort of progress on something :)

Now defining my blog persona has been an interesting process - am I a journaler? An essayist? An artist? (A whiner?) Should I write down what I'm thinking... the whole mess... or should I refine it into something? Should I be disciplined? Scattered? Is it humorous? Too goody two shoes? Photos semi out of focus? Underexplosed? Whole knitted project in view?

I'm overthinking... I think... anyway, as much as I love artistic shots of knitting, I also really like down and dirty posts - the ones that show how garments get tweaked (or wholesale tortured) into what they become. I scower other people's blogs, blessing those that take time to explore the knitty-gritty. So I'm abandoning my "knitting photography as art" stance for this post... to show how I cheated to make this a fitted tank. Nothing to it really. I blocked the living daylights out of the back (before I even knit the front) because I panicked about my gauge and wanted to be sure it could be at least big enough to get on before knitting any more. With the front I realized that I couldn't block above the armholes that aggressively... I have rounded, sloped forward shoulders so the back fit like a dream, but the corresponding front needed to be about 5 inches narrower. I could have opted not to block at all (I've seen some unblocked that looked great) but with my yarn and gauge the pattern would have disappeared, not to mention it would have looked awkward to have the front and back so drastically different. I let the thing sit for days before I finally decided to try a compromise, block the top front gently, and the bottom a bit more to get that classic tank fit. It worked out perfectly. The "bend" in the pattern is not noticeable when the garment is worn, but it's just enough to keep me from having big wings of fabric hanging around my arms! Since the photo I also got the ribbing done. Would I jinx myself if I said an FO is on the horizon?