besting Barbara Walker part 2

My husband went out of town yesterday and he'll be gone until Friday. I've spent a good part of yesterday and today trying once again to get the best of Barbara Walker. Through much trial and error, stubborness, complete lunacy, and a few pina colada wine coolers, I've come up with a "cuff down" version of the peace symbol that I am bound and determined to incorporate into a sock. After ripping the damn thing out half a dozen times, I got to where I thought I had got the damn thing figured out. I even took some pictures of the finished cuff part that has the peace symbol on it to post, but as I was looking at the pictures of it I realized that I'm still not happy with it. Hell, I even typed up all my hard work thus far and saved it to my knitting designs file. The branches off of the center vertical line come off of it too low for my taste. I just don't have the strength to rip the thing out tonight and reconfigure it tonight. I'm ok with the basic overall pattern............ I think. I just want the diagonal lines to run a bit longer before they disappear into the circle. On paper, it should only take a minimal amount of tweaking to get it where I want it. the thing is I'm actually going to have to frog rows and rows of knitting in the round to get it back to where I want it to branch off.
I have these dreams of one day being a knit-wear designer, but I feel a bit humbled and disenchanted with the fact that it has taken me 2 stinkin days so far to work out this peace symbol (in the reverse from how Barbara Walker has it in her book) and I'm still not where I want to be with it.
I've had enough of "peace" tonight. I am most likely going to go work on a mandala window painting that I'm doing. If I pick up the needles again tonight it will most likely be to do some mindless knitting on a dog sweater I'm doing for our dog Nemo Xavier. I'm also posting a dog sweater that I finished on the way to Florida last month. I opted out of ribbing around the armholes (or legholes as it were) since somebody once told me that some dogs freak out having stuff like that around their legs so I opted for finished the hole with a crocheted crab stitch instead. The pattern is a variation on the dog sweater pattern on the Michael's site. Thus far its been my favorite dog sweater pattern. However, the dog sweater I'm working on now is knit int he round from the neck down (of course I had to alter the dimensions from the pattern since Nemo's chest size is bigger than the largest size they have listed and of course I had to make up my own intarsia pattern to put in it instead of the one that they have, but that just seems to be the way I'm wired..... can't leave well enough alone.)

Take that, Barbara Walker!!!!

Being that I am a hippie-new age-metaphysical kind of girl, it is only natural that I would want to knit a peace symbol, right? Afterall, I felt it necessary to make a peace symbol sand sculpture at the beach. Upon surfing the net, I managed to find such a thing. The pattern is in Barbara Walker's Treasure of Charted Knitting Designs. I was able to actually find the chart for it posted on the net, but wasn't able to get anywhere with it even with a key chart for what the symbols are. I went to the library and reserved the book. Now, apparently, when one reserves a book from the library and they need to contact another library to actually get the book, they call up Kevin Costner and ask him to act in his role in The Postman and send the message of the book request by horseback. No, no. That can't be right. You would actually get the book quicker that way. They contact Kevin Costner, and have him WALK the request to the library that actually has the book. Needless to say, it took two weeks to get the book to my local library. And guess what? I was on vacation when it got there. Now, it takes two weeks for them to get the book, but they only give you 48 hours to pick it up before they send Kevin Costner back into suburbia with the book. I did have the foresight that this might happen, though, and left my handy dandy library card with my neighbor who picked it up for me. So, I have been wrestling with this pattern. I swear this woman is related to Ann Budd( who has a warped sense of humore in heel turning) and that both Barbara Walker and Ann Budd work directly for the Dark Prince of knitting insanity. In the book, she has charts galore and a few written out patterns. I tried to match the written out instructions with the charts and make some kind of sense of it all. It only got me so far. So, what I did was take the vague instructions she provided and used my own sense of creativity to come up with the finished product. I stayed up til like 1am while I watched Animal Planet, determined to see it to the finish. (My hubby fell asleep with remote in a death grip in his hands and that's the show that came on. However, I'm not complaining too much. Perhaps it was that bit on naked mole rates that helped me speed the deciphering along.) The completed peace symbol is a bit rough around the edges, considering my own creative interpretation but I think I can tidy it up a bit on the real deal. The thing is..... I have bested you, Barbara Walker! HA! Take that. Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah. After completing the knitted piece, I did the Evan Almighty dance. Who's the knitter now, huh? I'm bad, yah, I'm a bad mama jamma allright.
I did have the smarts to write out what I was doing as I was deciphering the peace symbol and once I tidy it up a bit, I will post it here to share with all the other hippie knitters. I don't think I'm infringing on any copyright laws since the symbols Ms. Walker was suggesting that I do were not at all what I actually did.
Peace Out!
Namaste!