Indecision...

I have a very dear friend who is and always had been extremely bad at aphorisms. She just can't get them right. It's often pretty darned funny, but one of my very all-time favorites was the time she looked at me very seriously and said, "Well, you know, indecision killed the cat." Heh. It's now a common phrase in our household; I don't think my kids even know what actually did kill the aphoristic cat.

Let's hope that doesn't happen here. Because I'm in the middle of some indecisiveness myself, and if there's a truck bearing down on me, I may be in trouble.

I'm beginning to plan my knitting for the long plane ride ahead of me at the end of June. (What can I say? I'm a woman who likes to know where her knitting is. A towel's all very well and good, but knitting is the stuff of life. Give me a good book and a good knitting project, and I can wait in any airport in the world.) I've decided, for a number of reasons, that the knitting for this trip is all going to be very simple, with a preponderance of stockinette and garter stitch. This has a lot to do with the fact that the major knitting time will come in the form of two twelve-hour plane rides with an 11 and an 8 year old girl (not to mention my ginormous husband who is convinced that "what's yours is mine" is especially true when it comes to leg and shoulder room on an airplane), and driving on little bitty back roads in Scotland in a minivan with the aforementioned girls and husband, plus my parents. I don't think lace is a good choice under these circumstances. Nor, in fact, anything that requires any kind of concentration whatsoever. (And let's be honest here: I'll be doing as much of the driving as possible, because I'm the only person I trust to be driving on the left side of the road. Rick's not bad at it, but as a right-handed person, he keeps trying to shift the doorknob, while my left-handedness finally becomes an asset in a situation like this.)

So, with this in mind, I decided that two pairs of stockinette socks and some kind of shawl would do the trick, and then Anne showed someone wearing Shawl That Jazz (Ravelry link) on her blog, and I was all over that baby like a duck on a junebug. After exploring Ravelry (and realizing where else --scroll down -- I'd seen this shawl on the interwebs), I decided to get some Blue Moon Fiber Arts Twisted yarn. This decision was further influenced by the fact that I'm a member of their sock club and have a small discount there right now, and it seemed like the time had come to take advantage. I decided on this colorway.

Now, here's where assumptions make an ass of you and umption, because my assumptions had me expecting one thing, and another arrived. I've never seen Twisted in person, but have knit with STR several times, as well as with Geisha, which I loved. So I had certain ideas about what the colors would look like. To be frank, I hadn't looked at pictures of Twisted yarn in the skein, and was expecting something like the sock yarn. But it's a very different sort of yarn.
Don't get me wrong, please. I like the yarn. I like it a lot. It's just that I was visualizing knitting the shawl in a tight-twist yarn with long color changes, and I'm having trouble changing gears (why yes, I am a spirited child, why do you ask?). I adore this colorway, so I'm trying to decide among several options: a) suck it up and knit the darned thing with the yarn already (big baby); or, b) use this yarn to knit a sweater for Younger Daughter and order myself some STR heavyweight in this colorway and use that for Shawl That Jazz (I know, it would be smaller, because that yarn is lighter-weight).
I think that the real answer is c) cast on for the shawl with this yarn and see what I think. If I like it, tuck it away until the plane takes off, and if I don't, order the other yarn. I'll need to do that quickly if I decide to go that route, though, since I want to leave enough time to be sure the yarn will get here before I go.

Meanwhile, knitting continues in other areas. I have started the ribbing on the linen top.
I don't know if you can tell from that photo, but I started every other purl rib at first (essentially, k6 p2) and did that for about an inch before starting the 2x2 rib. The hope was that doing that would bring the sweater in gradually under the bustline, instead of more dramatically. We'll see. I'm starting to wonder if this is going to be too big (yes, there's that mistaken body visualization again), and am thinking that I should probably put half of it on another needle and try it on now, before I get too much further.
It does shrink up a little bit when it's washed, but not too much. Of course, I could just Trust the Swatch, but that doesn't always work out as well as it should. In the end, a swatch can only tell you so much. It's funny how quickly Rick grasped that when I talked to him about it (one benefit of an engineer's training, I suppose; and speaking of engineers, have you seen this? I laughed. Hard.). He immediately hit on the salient point when he said that a swatch is only so big, and it can't tell you much about what will happen when the weight and pull of all of the yarn in a garment is acting on any particular area of that garment. Of course, only knitting the actual piece will show that, so I swatch as a sort of sacrifice to Yarn, and then just keep my fingers crossed and knit.

I'm also working on this beauty, with which I am wholly delighted.
Thanks to Anne, I finally figured out what I was doing wrong with the faggoting, and ripped back and fixed it, and I am so glad that I did.
This combination has exactly the textured feel I was looking for. It looks like a chest of pirate treasure, like gems all piled up and waiting for me to sink my hands into them. I am going to wear this one a lot.