Crazy Knitting

I've started what might be a crazy knitting project.  The image above is of a "coffee cloth" from Marianne Kinzel's First Book of Modern Lace Knitting, and I love me some lace knitting.  I haven't done any lace knitting in the past few years a. due to time and b. I never wore the scarves and shawls I made, so I stopped making more.

I never wore them because I'm not really a shawl person, and although I liked lace knitting, I wasn't really a lace wearing person until recently.  I spent the last few years of college and the first few years of graduate school trying hard to look grown up and professional, so there wasn't much room in my closet for frilly things. Due in part to having more room in my life to not dress professional (hello next year of no teaching!), my own changing taste, and more confidence that I can be taken seriously while wearing ruffles and lace, I wanted to go back to lace knitting.

But I'm still not really a shawl wearing person.  I do wear a lot of circle skirts, though, and I had several balls of a wool/silk blend in my overflowing stash.  (I have a newfound concern with clearing out my stash besides our impending move: I found another ball of 100% wool which had many of its wraps snapped, I assume from being eaten by moths.  We've never had moth sachets in our house before, but we do now!)

So here's the plan: I cast on and knit a stockinette stitch yoke to a little more than my waist measurement, leaving the ends unconnected so there will be a slit to get me in and out of the skirt.  I gradually increased the yoke so that it measured both more than my hip measurement and had the right number of stitches to repeat the lace pattern. (Rather than starting with the very center of the pattern, which was all just [k1 yo] rep to get the piece to size, I started a few rounds down where the actual lace pattern started).  When the yoke got to the right size, I connected the ends and knit a few rows in stockinette in the round, then started the lace pattern.  The original pattern has eight repeats of the pattern; my skirt has twenty five.  And rather than wearing just the lace, which is intentionally see-through, I plan on making a silk or other light fabric circle skirt to go with it, and stitch them together at the yoke, leaving the hem of the lace to do its own thing.

Does that sound like a crazy project?  Have you ever had a technique you wanted to do, but didn't know what to do with it that would be wearable/useable for you?