In which I have something functional, as my friend Melissa the social worker says, to report

Hello friends! Perhaps you will recall how I vowed this year to take control of my knitting? Yes, I vowed to take control back from wishful thinking and stupid patterns and blindly following what my gut told me were gauge errors or failures of proofreading or the like. Perhaps you have been wondering, Hey, how is Max doing with that? Is her knitting getting any better, after all those bosom-swelling emotional vows?

Well, the answer is Yes. It's better. To wit: Above is my Joelle's Favorite Yoke Sweater from the almost-unbelievably good KnitKnit by Sabrina Gschwandtner. This was going to be my Joelle's Favorite Gone Pear-shaped, since I am pear-shaped and the pattern has no shaping at all, pear or otherwise, instead relying on ribbing round the middle. I thought I'd just make size XL on bottom, size S or M on top, and find a good spot to accomplish the decreases (after consulting with Dr. Stacie).

But after I got through the bottom ribbing and maybe a half-inch of sweater, suspicion began to gnaw like the worm at the apple. Another time, Pre-Vow, I would've sailed past it. But now I could not. So I put the stitches on some waste yarn, and friends, you really have to understand the depth and breadth of my conditioning to ignore problems to appreciate how momentous this is, I tried on the sweater.

That's when I realized that although it's true I am pear-shaped, the pear part doesn't really begin an inch below the waist. It's further down. Like an actual pear. Yes, my hips are wide, but my waist is not 48 inches. At least not at the moment. So I ripped out, cheerfully enough, and cast on for size S.

Among the good news is, reducing the sweater from 320 stitches to 252 should speed things up.

In other news, my son has been diagnosed with wheat, dairy, and egg white allergies. While this means evicting some (okay, lots of) food from the menu, it's also meant trying new things. I was inspired by this delicious-looking post from Alicia to make some polenta niblets to go with the homemade sausages and homemade tomato sauce (never used to make those from scratch). I always thought I didn't like polenta. But I was wrong. And look at the package! Is it not a little masterpiece of packaging design? 'Tis. I'm enjoying this experimentation.