Inconceivable!

I am a knitter, but I am a self-taught solitary who has never participated in a stitch-n-bitch or any other social knitting. I am a member of ravelry.com because that's where you find all the cool patterns, but I haven't updated a project there since The Early Days of Knitting(tm), when it was still a miracle to me that two sticks and some string could make things that were useful and beautiful, and also when I had more time to update my projects pages.

ANYWAY. I am an asocial knitter. I knew that there were things called Knit-Alongs, KALs, which sounded a lot like socializing to me, and also knitting on a schedule and usually not a project I was all that interested in. I mean, how many shawls do I need, really? I'm more of a sock and sweater girl, with a side of cowls and rugs for the handspun stuff. And then there's the subset of KAL, the mystery KAL (MKAL), in which the pattern is bought, sight unseen, and doled out with clues over the course of weeks.

I hadn't exactly sworn that I wouldn't do such a thing, but I reckoned it highly unlikely. 

And then one day, while prowling Ravelry's pattern library for something--I spotted As You Wish: An Inconceivable MKAL. My mind leapt immediately--because I am a GenX child of the 80s--to The Princess Bride. Surely, I thought, this cannot be a MKAL themed on the Princess Bride! Why, that would be... 

No, not "inconceivable," but so irresistibly cool a notion that I clicked on the link, and then the next thing you know, I'm looking at (and pricing, yikes) yarn and harrassing Nous for opinions about various colorways. I posted on Facebook (a semi-serious "talk me out of this idea, it's kinda A Lot, right?"), which garnered a lot more enthusiasm than I had been expecting from both knitters and non-knitters. I even took the mad step of joining the project message boards (though I want it known I have not actually posted a voidspit thing yet). 

To the surprise of no one, I bought the pattern and got a kit from Frabjous Fibers and Wonderland Yarns.  The name of the colorway is "Battle of Wits," which I chose partly for the the purple and the speckled hank and partly for the name. The first clue drops Feb. 22, and I hope by then to have cleared at least one of my outstanding projects off the needles, because I'm gonna be on a schedule, people. 

Expect to see updates.