Ruthless Knitting

Pattern: Harry by Martin Storey from Jaeger Handknits JB29
Size: 6-9 mo. (20" chest)
Yarn: Knit Picks Telemark (100 percent Peruvian highland wool; 103 yds per 50 g ball) in Lichen, Colonial Blue, Delft Heather, Squirrel Heather, Icicle, and Deep Navy; Henry’s Attic Kona Superwash DK, undyed
Yardage: Unknown quantity of leftovers
Sources: Knit Picks; Catnip Yarns 
Needles: US 3 (3.25 mm) and 4 (3.5 mm) straight needles
Gauge: About 25 stitches and 32 rows  = 4" in stockinette stitch
Notes: This little sweater is so satisfyingly cute that it makes up for the lengthy finishing stage, which involved sewing up all the pieces, knitting up the button bands and seaming them on, knitting on the collar, and weaving in far more ends than I could possibly have produced in the process of knitting the sweater.

I decided to knit Harry in the first place because I had a bunch of leftover Telemark yarn in search of a project. Unfortunately, I didn’t know exactly how much I had of anything, so I had to make some educated guesses about how many stripes I could manage of each color, and I did run out of navy blue at the end — as I ran out of just about every color. This made the decision about what color to make the collar quite simple: the collar had to be gray, because that was the only color I had left in sufficient quantity. And then I ran out of gray, so the collar is a bit on the short side. I decided to finish it off in navy to help make it match the rest of the sweater. Necessity is the mother of invention.

While looking through one of my grandma’s photo albums yesterday, I saw a picture of a sweater she made me for Christmas when I was about ten. I had forgotten all about this sweater, and I was surprised to find that it uses the exact same pattern as the Harry sweater (horizontal stripes with a few rows of "teeth" at each transition) and pretty much the same colors (several shades of blue with white on top). How delightful!

I’m visiting my parents this week, so I’m trying to get my mother’s second sock done while I’m here. Next up will probably be a sweater from the Woobu yarn that I showed in my last post. I knit a swatch that I’m very happy with; I have to see what the intended recipient thinks. The Woobu knits up like a dream, and it has a really impressive shine that somehow manages not to be garish. I’m looking forward to working with it.

New ideas are being hatched here at Ruthless Knitting. Maybe it’s because spring finally seems to have arrived, or maybe it’s just that my pesky Secret Design Project is nearly finished, but I have knitting excitement percolating in my brain for the first time in what seems like a long time!

To go with it, I present to you a new swatch:

I’m working on a design that will combine these two colors, with a patterned intarsia pattern inset between plain stockinette. The maize-colored part looks sort of interesting in the picture, as if I had come up with some sort of elaborate design featuring both lace and cables, but in fact I was just experimenting with different patterns. The bottom is a variation on feather and fan, but I didn’t think it was open enough to work for the project I have in mind. The top is supposed to be staghorn cables, but I messed up the pattern several times, producing both something that looks like a mean owl and one cable that sort of reboots partway through. No matter — I got the information I wanted from the exercise, which is that I like the cable and the needle size (US 5) and that the overall plan will probably work. Now I just need to figure out some measurements, and I can get moving on something new. Yay!

Tomorrow, I’m headed to Neenah for the Midwest Masters conference, where I will take an all-day socks class with Lucy Neatby. On Sunday, I’ll take an afternoon class on brioche stitches with Janet Szabo. While I’m looking forward more to the second class, I am definitely interested in finding out what Lucy’s class will be like. I’ve never actually taken a knitting class before, and I understand that she is an excellent teacher. I’m looking forward to learning new things and getting lots of great ideas.

Every now and then, I swatch something that doesn’t work out, but I want to keep a record of what I did and spread the swatch love with others. Thus, my first Swatch Feature is born!

The twin rib pattern is taken from Barbara Walker’s second stitch treasury. It’s basically a 3×3 ribbing with a garter column in the center of each set of three stitches. Like mistake rib, both sides are identical, making this pattern a nice choice for edgings whose wrong sides are likely to show. A garment or edging knit in twin rib won’t curl, but neither is it likely to lie flat. Instead, the pattern produces a softly fluted fabric.

To work twin rib, cast on a multiple of 6 stitches and then K3, P3 on the right side and K1, P1 on the wrong side. I used a size 6 needle and yarn that probably falls on the light side of DK.

While the result here is a bit fussier than what I want for the sweater I’m planning, I think twin rib would make a lovely edging for a feminine cardigan in a nice smooth yarn, perhaps combined with an all-over eyelet pattern on the body.

I’ve been knitting away on my Middlebury sweater, which you may recall temporarily stumped me a while back with its tendency to scrunch up on the needles. I needed to figure out whether it would hold a lengthwise blocking or whether I had to make it longer to compensate for its desire to be scrunched up, which would have meant ripping out the piece I was knitting and starting over with fewer stitches. Well, I finished and blocked one side of the front, and it looks like it will hold the length just fine when it’s draped on my body. Here’s a picture that shows what it looks like when you hold it up in the air:

It would have been a better picture if I had turned the knitting around, as what you’re actually looking at here is the back. Whoops.

And here’s my progress so far — one side of the front (again shown backwards) and about two-thirds of the length to the armholes on the back.

I’m still enjoying the project, though it occasionally occurs to me that I have a long way to go, and I’m not sure how long my love will hold out. Let’s just hope nothing better comes along.

Meanwhile, the other day, I was skimming back through the Yarn Harlot’s Knitting Rules and I came across a statement about how she always keeps her swatches and maybe some day she’ll sew them up into a blanket. (I’m paraphrasing; I don’t remember what she actually wrote.) It crossed my mind that maybe my swatches could be a blanket, so I laid them all out on the bed.

It was a lot of fun to look at all of my swatches again, but . . .

. . . I think they’d make one ugly blanket.

It’s been about a week since I blocked Frances, and this is all I have managed to do so far toward remedying the sleeve situation:

To tell the truth, I also got most of one sleeve rehemmed, but then I realized that I’d forgotten to decrease in the first row of the hem, so I’ll have to rip it out and do it over. Sometime.

I’ve been rather scattered in the knitting department lately, drawn to lots of different ideas but not too interested in tackling anything that requires any sort of commitment. All my progress has been swatch-sized; in the past week or so, I’ve swatched for four different projects. For a while, I considered this unworthy material for blogging, but then I enjoyed Desi Knitter’s post about her swatches so much that I thought I’d go ahead and write about what I’d been knitting.

My first swatch, a bodice design for Gryphon, has to remain unphotographed until its debut, but it’s coming along better than any of the others. I’m writing up the pattern for the person who will wear it, and then later I’ll write it up for all the sizes.

Meanwhile, I also started one of the fronts for the cardigan I’d like to make with the yarn I bought in Vermont. I got this far –

– before I stalled out. See how I’m stretching the piece here? That’s how I like it, with the stripes between the ridges showing. That’s also the correct width for one front piece. But when I let go, the fabric snaps back into a much shorter and wider shape. I have to figure out how much lengthwise blocking this yarn and this stitch pattern will take and hold on to. In other words, can I stretch it to my desired length and count on it to stay there, or will it gradually get shorter and shorter as I wear it until I have several more inches of positive ease than I want, as well as ribbing at my belly button?

It’s occurred to me that maybe the thing to do is to knit the back in matching two-row stripes, but without the garter ridges. If I do that and then seam the cardigan together, the fronts should remain the same length as the back, since they’ll be quite firmly attached at the seams. With that plan, the big question becomes what the row gauge will be for the back, and if I stretch the front to match it, how wide is the front piece then, and do I like how it looks? I have thus far been completely uninterested in discovering the answers to these questions, so the Middlebury cardigan has been placed in a Ziploc bag until the urge strikes to resolve the mystery.

Last week, I also came up with this swatch as a possible plan for some Silky Wool that I bought in the recent Webs sale.

The idea here is to knit a cardigan with this cabled ribbing at the bottom, one cabled rib traveling up each side next to the button band, and a reverse stockinette backdrop. It would have short, tight-fitting sleeves. I’m not sure whether the stitch pattern pops enough on the swatch, though, and I fear the pattern will just disappear, in which case I probably shouldn’t bother with fancy cables. Sometimes I like this swatch, and sometimes I don’t. It’s hanging out in a drawer now. (Cyn of the Half-Assed Knit Blog bought what appears to be the same color and had the same problems with it, so I guess it’s not just me.)

Finally, there is this, which I worked on yesterday:

For many months, I had planned to use these two yarns to make a baseball-shirt-style sweater, with solid green sleeves and a variegated body. But the longer I thought about it, the less I wanted to knit such a sweater, so for a few days I’ve been idly considering what else I might be able to do with these two yarns. I turned over the problem in my mind at yoga today and came up with a plan for a stranded design that I tried out when I got home and immediately abandoned — the colors here are far too close even for subtle colorwork designs to show up.

Then I saw this stitch pattern in Barbara Walker’s second treasury, swatched it, and am rather delighted with the result. In her book, the two colors are sharply contrasting dark and light, and the blocks really pop out against the stripey background. There’s a similar version of the pattern, which is called Wave and Box Stitch, shown in this picture at Knittingfool.com. In my version, the two yarns blend together so much that the pattern just allows the solid green to mute the variegation and frame it, which I like. (For comparison’s sake, there’s a picture of the two yarns by themselves in this post.) I’m thinking of knitting a pullover with this pattern used for the body. I’ll have to figure out the sleeves later; I don’t have enough of the Zephyr for sleeves, but I could probably buy more if I wanted to.

One reason for my drifting about from swatch to swatch, which I’m reluctant to admit even to myself, is that my right forearm has been showing signs of a repetitive strain injury. I don’t actually think it’s from knitting — I think it’s from mousing at a bad angle at my desk, where I do mouse-intensive editing work all day — but the knitting surely doesn’t help. David installed a keyboard tray on my desk, and I am endeavoring to improve my ergonomics and use more keyboard shortcuts. Unfortunately, I’ve also resolved that I need to cut out knitting for at least a few days. Hopefully, by the time I post again, I’ll be quite recovered and we can pretend this never happened.

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P.S. If you have yarn in your stash that you don’t intend to use and are looking for somewhere to send it, Steph of Who Needs Gauge? could use donations for the knitting club she runs at her school. I took the opportunity to divest myself of a dozen balls of cream-colored wool that my aunt send me to use in finishing the Thelma sweater. And should this process make you reflect about your stash itself, wondering what you want to have and how much and why, I’d point you toward an interesting post at Mishka Knits on this subject that didn’t, in my opinion, get the attention it deserved.

I finished up Frances over the long weekend. I didn’t think the last bits would go so quickly, but somehow I managed to fit in quite a bit of knitting while also cleaning and painting the garage floor with David, mountain biking, cleaning all the floors in the house, doing the touch-up painting in the basement, going to the farmer’s market with David on our bikes, and so on.

Once I finished the knitting, it took me three days to get all the ends woven in. Two ends per stripe x lots of stripes = eleventy million ends. But this morning I managed to finish them and to get the sweater blocked. I’m a little worried about how much it grew in blocking — not from the yarn blooming but just from the weight of the wet yarn, despite how careful I was not to let it stretch out. I wanted some growth in most of the dimensions so that the sweater would be a bit looser-fitting, and that seems to have worked out, but I didn’t count on so much growth in the sleeve length. I may have to rip out the last stripe on each sleeve and create a new hem one stripe earlier. We shall see. Meanwhile, here’s a peek at what Frances looked like prior to blocking:

With that finished, I’ve been swatching the yarn I got in Vermont for what might be my next project. I had a plan for this yarn, but once I saw how it knit up, I changed it. Now I’m considering a cardigan with a stripey, textured front and back (as shown in the stripey, textured swatch) and plain purple sleeves, with ribbed bands. Whether I’ll begin that soon or work on swatches for another sweater has not yet been revealed to me.

Oh, and I finally got around yesterday to adding a baby picture to my random things post. In case you missed it, here I am in my two-year-old glory:

Since returning from Vermont, in addition to completing the Nine-to-Five Socks and making the XOXO Baby Socks, I’ve also finished up a couple old projects that have been lying around making me feel guilty.

First, I managed to reseam and weave in all the ends on the turtle sweater (explanatory backstory is here and here), and on Tuesday I returned it to its rightful owner, Gwendolyn. You may recall that the hood opening was too small for her, causing much consternation when her mother tried to dress her in the sweater. I solved this problem by (1) taking the sweater apart; (2) ripping out about 10 rows of the back, increasing a whole bunch of stitches evenly across the back so that it had as many stitches as the hood does at the back, and knitting up the remaining rows; (3) grafting the hood and the back together; and (4) grafting the shoulders together. Now it’s quite stretchy. As you can see, Gwendolyn looks adorable in it (though a tad concerned — I was babysitting her, and this is the look that means, “You are okay, but you are clearly not my mother”).

There are still some things about the sweater that I don’t like, but it’s better than it was. Should you ever wish to knit a copycat sweater, I posted the chart for the chart on my Designs page.

Next up, I finally got around to putting an edging on the hairpin lace afghan that may or may not have been knit by my grandmother. (Original posts about this project — from March, yikes! — are here and here.) To do this, I purchased some turquoise yarn in a similar color to the turquoise in the blanket, double crocheted across the unfinished edge, single crocheted back across, and then picked up a stitch through every crocheted stitch and knit several rows of garter stitch before binding off. The edges look much better now, though still not perfect. I did my best.

The blanket’s edge originally looked like this:

And now it looks like this:

Good enough, I think. I’m sending this off to my brother James today.

Having cleared up every last item of Duty Knitting except for my second Red Herring sock (to be cast on soon), I’ve been plugging away on the second sleeve of Frances and trying to get my Florence pattern written up. Busy as a bee, I am.

Also, Presents!

I got some excellent packages in the mail last week. First, I received two skeins of Undertow from Gryphon in the color “Cramp.” These were my prize for sort of winning her bodice design contest. I say “sort of” because I was the only entrant, and I didn’t exactly follow the rules. Still, a bodice will come of it, and I got some pretty yarn:

Now I just need to figure out to do with these. I haven’t formulated a plan yet. (The cardigan pattern and Undertow yarn are both for sale in Gryphon’s Etsy shop.)

Gryphon also sent a skein of Traveller, one of her hand-dyed sock yarns, for me to use in doing swatches for the bodice. I made a swatch using four different needles, and I had to show you a picture because this yarn is just so pretty. It’s soft and squooshy, too. I highly recommend it.

Then, on Saturday, I got my prize package in the mail from winning Mel’s contest. She sent a skein of Three Waters Farm fingering-weight yarn in the color lilac, as well as a great lavender rosemary goat’s milk soap from the same farm. I was thrilled to get these, both because I love to try local, sustainable products and because they remind me of the Piedmont of North Carolina, where I used to live. Thanks, Mel!

Once upon a time, I knit a sweater with a turtle on it for little baby Gwendolyn.

I used Mission Falls 1824 Cotton, and I made up the intarsia pattern myself. When I finished it, I was a little concerned that the head opening was too small, but given that Gwen wasn’t exactly born yet, and given that I didn’t expect the sweater to fit her until she was about nine months old, I didn’t have any way to figure it out for sure. So I had Leona try it on.

As you can see, it fit Leona perfectly well, and Leona has a biggish head. “Good enough,” I thought.

Seven months later, Gwendolyn is getting bigger all the time, and she’s just about big enough for the sweater. But it doesn’t fit her, because her head is not as squishy as Leona’s. Indeed, the process of being forced to try on the sweater made her quite grumpy, and she didn’t cheer up until her mother had removed the offending garment. Obviously, something must be done.

Gwendolyn’s mom would like me to try to fix the sweater, and I am only too happy to comply, in part because it gives me an opportunity to fix a few things about it that I never liked anyway. Also, it will provide a welcome distraction from my glacial progress on the back of Florence (formerly the Habu top), which looks like this:

Why have I managed to finish so very little of Florence? Well, there is the regular business of life: I have had to attend to work, house cleaning, bike riding, jogging, yoga, grocery shopping, making dinner, lunch with Gwendolyn’s mom, and so on.

Also, I’ve been trying to work up the Buster pattern so I can submit it to the Jimmy Beans Wool contest. I thought the hard work would be over when I got the charting done, but, uh, no. It’s been pretty painful. And just when I thought I was getting somewhere (around Wednesday), I realized that I had to more or less start over. So the Buster pattern and I are not on good terms right now.

Then, yesterday, after Yarn Harlot wrote about Mystery Stole 3, I totally got sucked in to the idea of making a mystery stole. I was particularly excited about using up a skein of laceweight yarn that I bought last winter with no particular project in mind. So I signed up, only to learn that I needed a lot more laceweight yarn than I actually had. I decided to just cast on for the swatch for the project, figuring I’d sort out some kind of plan as I went along. Luckily, by the time I finished the swatch, I had come to my senses: I don’t have the yarn for a stole right now. I don’t want to make a stole right now. And I have lots of other things I would rather do. I resigned from the Mystery Stole group this morning.

(Let me add that this outcome is one of many reasons that I love to swatch. When I’m really jonesing to start something new, nine times out of ten all I have to do is knit a swatch for the new project in order to realize it will in fact be no more exciting than my current project. Then I wash the swatch, put it away, and get back to whatever I was supposed to be doing.)

Which was what, again? Oh yes, Florence. Well, instead of doing that, I took apart the baby sweater. Now it looks like this:

It is time to formulate a plan. Here is what I’ve been thinking:

(1) One thing I didn’t like about the sweater to begin with is how thick the seams are. They are probably an okay thickness for an adult garment, but they don’t work for a baby sweater. The thick seams on the sides and for the armholes were unavoidable (because I couldn’t have knit the turtle in the round), though I can perhaps improve them a bit by doing the seaming with a lighter-weight yarn. But there was no reason to seam the shoulders or hood, so this time, I’d like to graft them. This should have the bonus effect of making them stretchier, which should help the sweater fit better over Gwendolyn’s noggin.

(2) I seem to remember that the back of the hood has more stitches than the back of the neck was designed to have. I tried to solve this problem by increasing in the last few rows of the back of the sweater so that I had a one-to-one ratio of hood stitches to back neck stitches. This is why the back of the neck looks kind of wavy in the picture below.

I don’t think that increasing those stitches was a bad idea, but it didn’t help much, because then I bound them all off and ended up with an inflexible back neck anyway. I’d like to rip out a few inches of the back and reknit it so that it gradually increases in width to accommodate the hood stitches.

That brings me to (3). If I make the back bigger but leave the shoulders the same size, and if I graft the hood on, and if I graft the shoulders, do you think that will give the head opening enough ease and flexibility? Or do I need to do all of those things and make the shoulders narrower, leaving more head space? If I do that, I’ll have to rip out the whole hood, because the hood is knit onto the front, and I can’t adjust the shoulder size on the front without also ripping out the hood. That wouldn’t be the end of the world, but if I can avoid it, I will.

What do you think? Other ideas?

I’m glad that several of you picked up on the bit of drama in those diary entries. Rather than worry with Florence about whether her potential husband would turn out to be the kind of guy who gambled away the family silver, you wondered with me, “What kind of woman compares her boyfriend to another man? Who is this Bob fellow? A brother? A cousin? Not bloody likely.”

To spare you the pain of further fruitless wondering, I will transcribe for you a few more diary entries, beginning (as one should) at the very beginning. In between, I will show you pictures of my current knitting, which is giving me grief.

March 15, Bob started to work for Swan in Pittsburgh.

March 28, Bob left for Pittsburgh. Was to go to Cambridge Monday Mar. 29, 1926.

July 3 + 4, went to Buffalo + Niagra + Canada. Bob, Annie, Frances, and I were at Bobs home in Buffalo. met Bob’s mother + liked her real well. she is real nice rather girlish + is nice looking. looks like Bob.

The first few entries are rather understated, but they reveal more than it might seem at first. She started the journal when Bob took a job in Pittsburgh, which is a good 45 miles from tiny Enon Valley. He left later that month, and then (maybe) she didn’t see him again until the Fourth of July holiday, when she and Bob and some friends(?) traveled to Buffalo together and visited Bob’s mom. While the presence of the mysterious Annie and Frances on this journey is somewhat troubling, raising doubts about whether Bob was truly Florence’s boyfriend, the third entry at least suggests that Florence has her sights set on Bob. She is scoping out the future mother-in-law, and she is pleased with what she sees.

Then there is a gap of several pages and several months, and Bob drops out of the picture for a while. Perhaps they had a fight? Or is it just that his new job kept him away from Enon Valley and Florence?

Let’s segue from the pain that Florence may or may not have been feeling between July and October of 1926 to the pain that I felt a few hours ago when I realized that I accidentally cast on 10 too few stitches for the front of my Habu top.

This is how far I’d managed to get: 8 inches on size 5 needles. It took me a week. Well, okay, five days. But that’s not counting the weeks I spent figuring out what to make with the yarn, swatching, deciding it wouldn’t work, and starting over again. I had just finished the waist shaping and planned the increases up to the underarm shaping. I was pleased with myself.

Pride goes before the fall. I can’t shave 10 stitches off the size and still hope it will fit how I want it to, so all that knitting just became a giant swatch. Since I have lots of pink Habu, I will bind it off, wash and dry it to confirm that I have the gauge I think I do, and start anew. Sigh.

In October 1926, it seems that Florence started anew, too.

Met Ralph F. on Oct. 26 1926. Went with him steady until Sunday Jan 9, we had a spat. He spent Xmas 1926 with us. We attended several dances + several shows at Youngstown, Beaver Falls, + Palestine. While I was going with him, enjoyed his company real well. But never considered him anything more than a friend.

Florence obviously wrote this entry in retrospect, after she was no longer seeing Ralph. She seems to have decided to make her little book into a dating diary of sorts. Is it just me, or does she sound like she was trying to put a positive spin on her disappointment with old Ralph, who — let’s face it — was no Bob?

In just such a way, I am putting a positive spin on the Big Pink Failure by refocusing my attention on Mom’s birthday socks. After agreeing with me that it would be too much to ask me to rip out and reknit that first, perfect (but too small) herringbone sock, Mom mailed me two yarns she had in her stash and asked me to make her socks with one of them. They are both lovely: Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock in Charcoal and Schaefer Anne in a blue-gray color.

(Let’s take a moment to admire Mom’s cleverness: how better to use up the stash yarn than to suggest that your daughter make your birthday socks with your own yarn?)

Mom suggested either Monkey socks or Oriel from Sensational Knitted Socks as possible patterns, and being someone who would rather knit something new than knit the same pattern twice, I decided to do swatches for Oriel. The Schaefer obscured the pattern too much, but the Lorna’s Laces looked great, so I am off and running.

I got a whole pattern repeat (28 rows) done last night, but I think I messed up the last row, causing me much consternation this morning. I had to set it aside because I was irritated with it. Later, I guess I’ll tink the final row and do it over.

So, to bring this episode to a close, my knitting has made me feel a bit in the doldrums with Florence, but I’m hopeful that things will look up: after she gave up on that dud Ralph, Florence met Bill and wrote the two entries included in my last post. I’m sure that I’ll soon nickname the sock (I like the sound of “Slim”) and start to “enjoy [its] company more every night.” Or, just to keep that from sounding so dirty, let’s say “every day.”

More of Florence’s adventures to come, should you want to hear them, and more of mine whether you ask for them or not.

Oh my goodness, is it ever gloomy here! It rained all day yesterday, and it is raining again today. I know that April showers are rumored to bring May flowers, but the flowers were coming along just fine until the gloom arrived, and now the blooms on the forsythia bushes are all droopy.

What, I’m supposed to talk about knitting?

I have been obsessively writing out my pattern for Sanguine Gryphon Fiber Arts. All this mental math is good for my brain, which has not been tasked in this particular way for a very long time. I believe I finally cracked it (the pattern, not my brain) last night after making a number of errors and learning the hard way How Not To Write A Pattern. Hint: Don’t try to figure out all of the sizes at the same time. That’s crazy-making!

Here’s a picture of the Undertow yarn that I’m using for the pattern. Pretty, huh?

This is what it looks like knitted up.

If you’re tempted, you can go on over and buy some from Gryphon. I endorse it wholeheartedly.

I’m also working on the second baby tank, but so far it’s unworthy of a picture — just a messy-looking provisional cast-on and a few inches of undistinguished stockinette. Dark purple stockinette, should you care to imagine it.

I continue to pay fealty to the bathmat for a few minutes every day. It’s getting bigger, but it looks about the same. For the sake of variety, here is what it looks like when I’m not working on it (i.e. 23.8 hours a day):

I don’t always prop it up against the plant, of course. It’s just the only place in the house with enough light at the moment to take a decent picture.

Finally, I’ve been developing a design for a summer top using cotton Habu yarn, and after knitting a few large swatches and devoting thought to it on more than one bike ride — I have many of my best ideas while bicycling or jogging outdoors — I’ve come up with what I think will be a workable design. No, you can’t see it, but here is a little peek:

The weather today makes a summer sweater seem like a distant and somewhat absurd goal. I will bake bread instead.