Not one stitch

Well, I followed Carrie K's advice and went out to Knit Night last night and had a blast. First off, I got the parking spot RIGHT IN FRONT OF THE SHOP. If that isn't a portent of a good time, I don't know what is. Loads of great people were there, and DD1 was very well-behaved.

To put it more accurately, I think DD1 had a blast. The moment she hopped out of the car, she announced to all and sundry, "I'm four!" and it just got better from there. She had some food, played with her toy dog, explored the front of the shop (the annuals delighted her; fortunately we were able to warn her off picking them in time), met the owner's children, went with Elizabeth (fellow SnBer, not my baby daughter) to grab food (thank you so much, Elizabeth, I'm delighted you had fun, and I blush at your good mothering comment), ogled all the pregnant ladies...what more could a 4-year-old want, eh?

And then I took her to the back of the shop where Denny was spinning. Well. Not only was this desperately interesting because she could watch yarn being made before her very eyes, but there was also a machine involved with moving parts and everything! Very, very exciting stuff. She wanted to touch it, she wanted to play with it. Obviously we all made it clear that neither of these two things were okay since a) touching a spinning wheel in action was liable to result in pain; and b) Denny was already using the spinning wheel. But Denny did give DD1 a wee fluff of roving for her to take home with her (thank you, Denny :) and Rachel H, who also had her wheel there, showed DD1 how to press the treadle to work the wheel. And that was it for the evening, because for the next - oh, I don't know, half an hour? forty-five minutes? - DD1 did nothing but treadle. (I had to assume this was okay with Rachel since she didn't seem to want to kick DD1 off the wheel - thank you very much, kind lady, for putting your spinning plans on hold for the evening.)

This of course has fuelled my desire for a spinning wheel even more. Particularly when Mel told me that her daughter can treadle the wheel for ages and ages at a time. (I swoon to think how much more I could get done around the house.) And Denny backed Mel up. Alas, for my ship to come in...

But I also had a wonderful time. People loved seeing the baby and I got to chatchatchat to my heart's desire. (Well, to be truthful, 'to my heart's desire' would have involved staying a lot later than we did...however, since we already ended up being about 40 minutes late picking DH up from work, that wasn't going to happen.) It came home to me how much I had been missing these great people. I am definitely going to pack the kids up and do this again sometime, and I'm not going to wait another three months to do it.

Now. Ask me how much actual knitting I accomplished during the evening?

Didn't even bring it out of the bag. (Much like the digital camera, actually...sorry for the lack of pictures.) But ask me if I care. :)

In other news, we are highly busy over here at Insanity Headquarters getting ready for DD1's kids birthday party (the family birthday party was several weeks ago). I came downstairs yesterday evening after DH had done a big Costco run, and my heart almost stopped as I saw what was lying in the hall. YARN. Bags of it, in bulk, all wrapped up, and...wait...no.

What I had thought was yarn was instead...are you ready for this?...hamburger buns.

I may need help.

But c'mon, I mean look at this...

If your eye wandered over that, would you not think it was yarn? Back me up here.

The Girlfriend Shrug for DD1

I knitted sleeve #2 up to the same point as I'd left off on sleeve #1, and then I went back and forth between sleeves, making them absolutely identical until such time as I couldn't knit another row. Then I used what I had left over to cast on provisionally for the white strip up the back (there was exactly enough left for that, I felt like a total god).

White strip is looking good so far:


Unfortunately I don't think it's wide enough. I'll measure the whole back when I'm done, but I may have to cut the back on each side and insert two single-braid white cable strips to widen it up. Stay tuned.

The Poncho for DD1

Coming along! I think I'm just an inch or two away from being able to start the bottom edging:

Cotton lace shawl

Having given in and used someone else's pattern instead of making up my own was gnawing at me somewhat, so I've started an attempt at my own design. It is going both well and badly at the same time, if you can believe that. Some aspects of lace knitting design I totally get, but I'm woefully ignorant in other areas. I'm test-driving the pattern now, so I can see where I'm going wrong and figure out what is and isn't possible. It's certainly a very interesting process. Mostly the thing does look like what I wanted (so far), but I'm under no illusion that this happy state of affairs will continue. Stay tuned - watching me tear my hair out go through the learning process should be amusing.

Fortunately, my rank newbie status in designing complex lace patterns doesn't affect my ability to teach others how to knit lace, so I'm still mentally planning a class. (Carrie K, I suspect you are totally right that the yarn shop owner could see this in my eyes...but she also reads my blog occasionally, so I knew she'd figure it out sooner or later. :)