An Investment in Learning. Part I

So, last year sometime I was visiting my friend Miss Kayla down in the lovely town of St. Cloud and she ever so kindly led me to the local yarn store, Bonnie's Spinning Wheel.  It was a great experience. I met Bonnie herself, browsed for awhile and looked at the chamber of commerce photo on the wall taken nearly forty years before. Eventually I settled into actual shopping. Kayla was entertaining herself with a collection of buttons so my yarn-addict guilt was minimal.
I was there to shop for my aspirational knitting project. I had tagged it earlier that spring with great intentions and zero follow-through. I realized this was the perfect opportunity to find yarn for the project.
The project was, and is, the Talia Shaped Vest from the SweaterBabe. It is so pretty. I felt like it was the next step in my knitting. It has a little lace, it is going to test my shaping abilities, a couple new techniques and did I mention it was pretty? The suggested yarn was Lamb's Pride Worsted, which I have used for hats and the like but I wasn't sure if it was going to be my favorite for this project. I was really looking for an awesome navy color and, with Bonnie's help I found Favorite Wool in a navy color that was perfect and the yarn was nice and solid, easy to use for this big undertaking. I walked out with a big old bag of yarn and a heart full of determination.

I stashed that yarn so deep I didn't even really know where it was. I spent the intervening months making adorable baby vests and legwarmers, sussing out the secrets of sock-making, and exploring the miracles of mosaic knitting. Nary a thought was given to the aspirational vest that had fired my yarn spree all those months ago. Until a particularly cool July morning I opened up my queue on Ravelry and there it was,Talia, in the number one position. Had I not looked at my queue in that long? Was it been number one the whole time? I then realized I had everything I needed to make that vest. I don't think I have ever been able to say that about a big new project before.
I gathered each notion and set them up around me like little soldiers, printed out the pdf I had downloaded oh, so long ago and set about highlighting the pattern for my size. Then I realized this is not some garter stitch baby blanket I can whip up while watching subtitled movies in the dark. This vest is going to take many hours...hours that I will have to truly pay attention to the task at hand.
I mulled this over while I measured myself and decided on standard or metric measurements and browsed Netflix for an appropriate swatching show. I finally landed on a documentary I had been meaning to watch Prohibition from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. It turned out to be an odd source of inspiration.