That's going on your permanent record...

I'll admit it. I was an angel throughout school. The mere threat of, "Be quiet, or you're going to sit in the corner!" was more than enough to get me to sit politely for 12 years of schooling. But as time wore on, and the repetitive threats of "Mister, you'd better not act up again in my classroom or that'll go on your permanent record!" came again and again (directed at my classmates, of course!) I did wonder where this permanent record was kept. Perhaps at the FBI? I mean, who else would be able to track you down when you're 38 and remind you that you once disrupted class by falling off an airconditioner and had to ask the teacher to let you go home to change so you wouldn't have to flash your underpants to the rest of the school through that now present gaping hole in the butt of your skirt? Umm, no, that never happened to anybody I knew.

Misdemeanors on my permanent record aside, I didn't really ever believe that I'd need to know anything they taught me in high school anyway. Sheer fear is what drove me at the time to do my homework. I mean, what would I do if I didn't get a perfect score on my tests?

Except that sometimes, those teachers were right. You might just need to prove that a right triangle has the dimensions of a^2 + b^2 = c^2. Like today for example.

So if you've been following along, yesterday I showed a horrible attempt at a swatch to fix my unbiased bag's tendency to dump it's contents out of the too shallow middle. It looked something like this. Eek I say. But there isn't anything fundamentally wrong with the construction, I think. The original just looked like the diagonal edge was too stretched out to make those perfect little squares that make my heart soar. (yes, I get turned on when things all fall neatly within straight lines at right angles to each other. sue me.)

*thinking all morning*

Doh!

It's a triangle, stupid! The diagonal edge has to be LONGER than the sides, so unless you're expecting your gauge to magically change by a factor of 0.7 when you change the direction of your knitting from diagonal to horizontal, there's some adjusting to be made, dumb a$$.

Second try:

This time, I fudged my stitch count on the short rows to get 0.7 times the number of stitches along the diagonal by just K2tog here and there when I knit the stitches from the diagonal. Looks, better, no? Okay, still not a square, but rectangular I can live with. And at least now I don't have to worry about the FBI coming to my house to question my geometry grade from my permanent record.

Big mahalo goes out to Keohinani! She was kind enough to obssess over my design dilemma and send me 4 bmp of diagrams of her ideas. I think she fixed my problem of having to seam the piece together, and now that I have the target stitch count for bag, this is looking like a real possibility! Now the only question is, do I add a gusset or just make it a flat bag?

In other news, I've been having recurring You Knit Too Much dreams. For the past two nights, I've been fantasizing about going to my computer, going to my Knitty bookmark, and hitting reload, reload, reload.. until the winter 2005 issue magically appeared. Yes, that was really ONLY in my dreams. *ahem*

And, it's looking like the Christmas mad dash to finish may come in under the wire. Perhaps even with a day or so to spare! I'm 80% done with Hoodie Boogie Rock 2 and designs for Unbiased Redux are coming along for my ghost knitter, who incidentally is 75% done with the Bones hat for our friend DL. Thanks again DF!