Shallange!

It's another four years to the next summer Olympics, another 300-some-odd days until the 2009 Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest, and you're experiencing competition withdrawal?

Well, you've come to the right place!

v.

Like Venus and Serena, like Eli and Payton, like, well, that pretty much exhausts my knowledge of sporting siblings, these two Tangled Yoke Cardigans grew up together and shared the same dream. In this case, completion! About a year ago, my friend and fellow Spider Lisa (An Abundance Thereof) cast on for a Tangled Yoke Cardigan. Hot on her heels I cast on for mine. They flourished briefly, then, tragedy struck: knitting ennui. Both cardigans disappeared into obscurity, taking dead end jobs working the cash register down at the DQ and seeing the light of day only when Lisa or I happened to dig through our piles of works-in-progress looking for what the heck happened to all our US 5 circulars.

Lisa's TYC has suffered setbacks as recently as last month. She contended in the Ravelympics, and friends, let's just come out and say it, missed the mark. My TYC, on the other hand, demoralized and out of shape, didn't even have the guts to compete. But inspired by Lisa's progress, although non-medaling, somehow she made it back to the top of the WIP pile and she's grown pretty quickly over the last couple of days.

Galled by her Ravelympics experience, Lisa's TYC now has a new ambitious goal for completion: September 12. And mine, spurred by her cantankerous coach - no, not Bela Karoli, but me - has proposed a challenge: my TYC will reach completion not only by September 12, but before Lisa's.

It's on!

I'll admit it's especially ambitious on my end. Lisa has completed lower body and one sleeve. Personally, I think she's juicing. At first glance, my TYC is ahead:

But I've got some big challenges to power through. Namely:

Yeah, the usual. My gauge is SO INCONSISTENT that the sleeve I made like 10 months ago is a totally different size than the one I just started and am about 2/3 of the way through. The gauge is totally different. What's more, the new sleeve appears to be on gauge whereas the old is quite significantly below it. It's like I didn't even measure it! Thankfully, the body seems to be just about right, and shouldn't be a huge problem. But sleeve #1 is going to have to be re-knitted. So in the end, that puts my TYC well behind Lisa's, with the additional handicaps of my 12-hour days at work and general knitting laziness. It should also save some time that I have decided to eschew the whole "tangled yoke" portion of the TYC, possibly in favor of an enormous felted or knitted flower brooch. And I make up in spirit and determination what I lack in gauge skills and time! Or at least let's tell ourselves that.

Here's wishing Lisa's TYC good luck and wind at her back. Oh yeah, and eat my dust, Lisa's TYC!

ps - Intriguing. Has anyone ever seen Sunday Knits in person?

pps - Today's title brought to you by The Cosby Show [thanks, Nettie!]

Posted by jess at September 3, 2008 8:57 PM | TrackBack