Opptur

This weekend has been entirely dominated by the Nordic Skiing World Championships and a phenomenally high level of whining and pouting around home. Oh, and lots of knitting too. I've been going hard at the Cowl Vest in lace weight yarn, and have made it through all the decreases for the waist shaping:

Still not much to look at at all. The yarn has been unravelled and it's going to look terrible until it's blocked. I'm still hopeful that the project is worth doing. I have to admit that it's a little boring even for my minimalist tastes. My mind starts to wander to other projects. I've been revisiting the idea of knitting a Clapotis (from the Knitty website) in lace weight yarn on very small needles. I had bought the yarn two years ago, the last time I was at the SASS conference. It practically killed me to get it wound. No one will ever understand what a triumph this photograph represents:

It's a really nice green merino. I think it could work out really well. It would be cool to have a chic Clapotis to wear at SASS at the end of April--perfect to have a big open work scarf to wrap around my neck in windy Chicago.

The other thing I've been thinking about in knitting is a process called stacked color pooling. Here's an example on Flickr. Basically, you take a variegated yarn with fairly long color blocks, figure out how many stitches each section of  color is in width, and use that to figure out a pattern that will maintain each color in a column. It's fascinating, kind of like the Noro Lanesplitter skirt I knit back in September, only more challenging to figure out.

Work is going pretty well. I finished off the Fosse/Ibsen article and am getting it critiqued tomorrow. It would be great if I could get it sent off to a journal by the end of the week. I also just got word that I need to return some final corrections to one of my cabin articles that will be in an anthology. This is the last round before the whole book (which is on various aspects of cabin culture in Norway) gets sent out to peer review. And my very best news is that I got the go-ahead to teach an MA level seminar in the fall. I'm thrilled! It's going to be called "Romanens rom" (the spaces of the novel), and it's pretty much my dream seminar right now. I'm having tons of fun trying to decide on the exact reading list: so many good novels, so many interesting theories, and I can't include it all...