Gauge or something like it

I have, like most knitters, a love-hate relationship with gauge. I love the concept of it, I understand the need for it and I have the utmost respect for those of you that faithfully knit swatches until they get the desired result. But for some reason I can't seem to get gauge, like, ever. I know, that sounds a little overly dramatic. And I'm sure it would help a lot if I at some point actually used the yarn recommended in a pattern. But I look at knitting patterns the way I look at cooking recipes. "I like the end result, but what if I substituted milk for cream, leave out the zucchini and put in chocolate chips instead, and use butter instead of shortening."
Like with cooking, my knitting adjustments are made based on what I have lying around the house. If I don't have the lace weight baby merino, I will use the Red Heart sport weight acrylic that is lurking at the bottom of my modest stash.
To get gauge is challenging enough if everything else is equal, but the substitution game makes it even more so. Do I ever get gauge? Well, no. But my projects are often interesting. And like the Yarn Harlot, Stephanie Pearl-McPhee (check out her blog, link is in my links section, it is hysterical) I tend to think:"I'm sure it will fit someone."
My attempt at Evelyn Clark's Heartland shawl in sportweight acrylic turned out to be so frustrating that it ended up becoming an adorable tiny wrap that my terrible two year old parades around the house in. She looks absolutely precious in it, which makes all the ripping back, swearing and banging my head against the wall worth it. I would rather stick bamboo shoots under my fingernails than complete the pattern in the yarn I picked, there is no way I could have made that thing into a full size shawl for me, but my munchkin is delighted by it, so it's all good.

Delightfully decadent chocolate chip cookies

Since I can't post any pictures I thought I'd give you my newly made up recipe for chocolate chip cookies instead. I know, it's a bit of a let down, but trust me: these guys are good. Knitters rely on quick, easy snacks to keep up their energy without taking too much time away from knitting. The fact that the chocolate chips keep their shape means no messy fingers to soil your yarn. And the fact that they're chewy means no crumbs in that adorable little intarsia baby sweater. So without further ado:

Delightfully decadent chocolate chip cookies

Ingredients:
1 cup of butter (this is where the decadent part kicks in)
2 cups of flour
2 large eggs
0.75 cup of tightly packed brown sugar
2 tablespoons of honey
1 tablespoon of baking powder
2 teaspoons of pure vanilla extract
1 teaspoon of salt
1.5 cup of chocolate chips

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.
Melt the butter in a small saucepan, be careful not to brown it, and stir in the sugar until it is a melted gooey liquid. Pour in a large bowl and one by one add the eggs. Stir vigorously for a minute or so. Add the vanilla extract and the honey and stir again. Add the flour and baking powder, stir until mixed well and then toss in as many chocolate chips as you like. I put 1.5 cup in the recipe for those of us that know restraint, but for the rest of us: go nuts. They need to have at least a shred of dough attached to them, so don't go overboard. However, if the mixture seems to be two thirds chocolate and one third dough, you're good. (Kudos on your arm strength if you can actually still stir it by that point.)
Stick the bowl in the fridge for about 20 minutes to give the dough a chance to set a bit, and here's an old baker's trick for you: put the cookie sheets in the fridge as well. Cookies tend to burn on the bottom, and for some reason the cooled cookie sheets prevent that. Neat huh?
Form little balls of about an inch to an inch and a half and place them on the cookie sheet about two inches apart. (Or you can do as I do, just scoop up gobs of dough that look a decent size and put them willy-nilly on the cookie sheet. Go with what feels good, I always say.)
Bake for 10 minutes. If you like your cookies a little more crunchy, give them another minute or two.
And there you have it... delightfully decadent chocolate cookies. And yes, it is perfectly reasonable for you to stick them in a cookie tin labeled "healthy granola bars" to throw off your kids and spouse, and keep them all to yourselves. Enjoy!

The thing about pictures...

... is that they spruce up a blog. Really, what fun is a blog without pictures? I mean a blog about knitting. Were this a blog about politics, the importance of lowering carbon dioxide output, or how to become a better person in ten easy steps pictures wouldn't be mandatory (although the carbon dioxide one would benefit from some cool graphs and stuff). But knitting? Knitting needs to be seen, preferably in needlesharp shots that you can click on to enlarge.
And my terrible two year old has demolished the cable thingy that hooks up my camera to my computer. Joe explained how I could take the memory card from the camera and insert it in a computer port and presto, picture transfer possible, but to be honest I have no idea where to find the memory card. And since I have pretty lousy luck with gadgets (things tend to inexplicably stop working or fall apart when around me for a little while) I haven't tried it yet.
So no pictures until we can afford a new cable thingy. You will just have to take my word for it that I am making major progress on my Placida Flamenco Shawl (which mysteriously looks nothing like that picture) and that I am doing well on my Liz Snella's Heirloom Doily. I promise, as soon as I get over my fear of fiddling with expensive gizmos I will show you.

Overhaul

Since my last post (which has been a while, as you can tell by the date) we have fallen on hard times. DH has been out of work for close to ten months now, and things are not looking good. We are scrambling to make ends meet with the help of my inlaws, so buying yarn is not an option right now, and hasn't been for the past ten months. I have been forced to cut into my not so considerable stash which contains mostly polyester novelty yarns in baby colors. Yuck. My mother-in-law, who is a good woman and a good knitter but has no idea of yarn quality, told me the other day she would give me a bag of wool. It was pink and fuzzy, like mohair, she said. I was elated and started having visions of swallowtail shawls in a lovely dusky pink mohair to wrap around myself for warmth and comfort. Then I saw the bag, and my heart sank. It contained six skeins of Bernat Baby Lash in baby pink. Double yuck! I mentioned to DH I might put it up on Ebay, but he said his mother would want to see what I made with it. So I've hidden it in a seldom used closet until such a time where I can face up to knitting something that will look like half a dozen muppets had to die for it. So, dear kind mother-in-law, let me point a few things out to you here: yarn does NOT equal wool. Baby lash does NOT equal mohair. And polyester novelty yarn is about as far from wool as you can get. Sigh.

To keep myself from going nuts in a situation without prospects, I decided to tackle Evelyn Clark's Heartland Lace Shawl in, you guessed it, another polyester baby color yarn. I had a fairly large skein of unknown origin, it looks like a Red Heart sport weight, and I decided to just have a go at it to keep my hands busy. It also has my mind reeling, the pattern is impossible to memorize at least for me, but I am planning on making this shawl in a decent wool yarn once things take a turn for the better, and I am at least getting a feel for it this way. So no cool pictures of WIPs or FOs in this post. Stay tuned, who knows what is going to happen next!