QueerJoe Doppelganger

An attractive, gay, male knitter in my own town that I've heard about for years, and never met...until yesterday.

The Mysterious Marcus
It was downright strange. A couple of years ago, over the course of about a month, three people in my life (including Thaddeus) told me about a very good looking man they met named Marcus. Everytime I'd arrive somewhere, someone would say I just missed him. Coincidental, but not extraordinary. Until, the ladies at my local yarn store told me that he had been in the store, and he was a fearless new knitter who was undaunted by even the most complex Aran patterns.

Now I was intrigued, but still, this Marcus man eluded me.

The World Wide Web has a great way of bringing folks together. He found my blog and e-mailed me earlier this week. As an additional oddity, Marcus told me that many of my 100 Things About Me list applied to him as well. About 30 of them, including the fact that he's got his private pilot's license.

We scheduled to meet at Simply Knit so I could finally get to meet this elusive stranger. Despite fears that the universe would collapse in on itself when we met, I finally got to meet this talented knitter. We had a great time shopping after hours at the yarn store, and he is a wonderful guy. Here he is looking over some complex intarsia designs in an old Rowan magazine.



I also decided to move forward on the Mini-Chock-a-Block design without waiting for Matt's color input. I don't know if they will look as good as what Matt's working on, but I figure I can always make two different colorways of this sweater, or redo it in Matt's version if I don't like mine. Here are the 22 colors of Jamieson DK that I bought last night.



I have to decide on which color I will use as the border color. I also realize from this picture, that I will need to be sparing with the royal blue in the center top row and the coral/peachy color on the bottom towards the right.

Just In Time Project Bag
I had completely forgotten I had ordered a canvas bag from Antonio's site, EarthaKnit. It will be perfect for the new sweater project.



I also didn't realize it was imprinted on the reverse as well. Gawd, I'll look fabulous with my new project bag.



Donegal
Stitch by stitch, inch by inch, I make progress on this sweater, but I am bound and determined to get it done this time. I had to bring Thaddeus in for a medical procedure today, so I got another inch done while waiting for him. I don't plan on including another picture until I'm back up to the neck steek. It looks pretty much the same as the last picture.

In answer to the question, "Are you using the colors called for in the pattern?", the answer is yes. There are two colorways, Earth and Sky. I'm doing the Earth colorway and the only color that was no longer available was Wood Green (I think), but there was an almost exact match in something else (that works perfectly.

Self Patterning Sock
Also made some progress on the ribbing on this project while taking a break from Donegal at the hospital.



I never like the ribbing as well as the toe, foot and heel when knitting with self-patterning yarn. It just doesn't show up as crisply. But I'm still liking this yarn.