Starting off right

My last post made me think. I looked at the list of everything I wanted to knit in 2006, and thought about how it has felt in the last oh-so-many months being chronically underslept (because I kept staying up late to meet knitting deadlines); having the house crumbling around me (because I kept abandoning my household chores to meet knitting deadlines); and having to tell my dear little girlie that I couldn't play toys with her in the car (because I needed every spare moment to meet knitting deadlines). And...wonder of wonders...I began to see a connection. :) So, I have decided this year to SCALE BACK.

Yes, you heard it here first. I wish I didn't have to, I adore knitting (duh? ya think?), and would much rather spend my days doing it. However, I'm the only income earner in this family right now and I really like it when my husband, child and I have food, shelter and clothing, and I think I would also like more peace and household order in my life...so something's gotta give. (Sob.)

Therefore, this is my updated list of knitting goals for 2006:

• January 14: Persian Tiles shawl for Grandma
• January 17: All-in-one for baby Lounsbury
• February 17: Minnesota Mitts for DH
• spring: Heraldic tabard for moi
• June 5: Self-patterning socks for DH
• June 18: Dress socks for DH
• December 24: Something for MIL
• December 24: Stornaway sweater for DH
• throughout the year: five baby projects, mostly self-designed, to be assigned sparingly - I will therefore have to control myself and not make a baby garment for every person I've ever had a passing acquaintance with who announces a pregnancy this year
• throughout the year: three pairs of socks for me

We shall see if a) I can actually follow through with all this; and b) it improves my sanity.

Moving along, my profound thanks to Kelly, Gillian and jkh, who all backed me up in the comments a few days ago on the subject of how impressive my husband's knitting is. He is still being pretty self-deprecating about the whole thing but at least is occasionally acknowledging that he's doing pretty well for a beginner. Clearly we have a long way to go, but it's a start.

Fafner blanket for baby Muth

Friday being the last day before New Year's, we were let go early from work. So I came home and worked on this in an effort to find out ASAP whether or not I was going to run out of turquoise yarn. I knitted and knitted and knitted and am now only about ten pattern repeats from finishing:


Sadly, it don't look good for the turquoise yarn:

(my foot included for scale)

The nice thing is that I have a good chance of finding more of this stuff at Zellers. However, since I started using the turquoise yarn specifically to get it the heck out of my stash, I despise the idea of buying any more. In fact, I am so not into buying more that I think I would be willing to cannibalise the turquoise dragon cables (thereby necessitating a re-knit of most of the centre portion of the blanket) in order to salvage more turquoise yarn for the edging.

The kicker is that even though it looks bad, turquoise-wise, I still don't know for sure, and the miles of edging were starting to suck out my soul, so I gave up for a little while.

Stay tuned for the continuing drama.

All-in-one for baby Lounsbury

Driven by the desire to finish something on the urgent list, I concentrated on this for most of the weekend and got almost everything done. I finished the back, I did the front, I did all the edgings, sewed all the seams, wove in all the ends, found buttons for the crotch and sewed them all in.


Just one thing couldn't be done: I couldn't find good buttons in my collection for the shoulder straps. (Curses! Foiled again...) So this evening while visiting my parents, I mooched off of my mom's button stash. I found the perfect button. It was a precise match to the lavender in the onesie and the exact right size for the buttonhole. Behold:

(enjoy also the extreme closeup of my kitchen floor tile)

See the problem?

(Hint: there is only one. I went through the entire flippin' box of buttons one by one and could not find this a mate. Clearly I have not built up enough good knitting karma for myself. Alas, I shall have to content myself with less-perfect-but-still-acceptable cream-coloured buttons.)

Sadly, the shoulder straps are still button-less because I forgot to bring the cream yarn for the project along to actually do the sewing of the buttons with. The lights are on but nobody's home, I tell ya.

Persian Tiles shawl for Grandma

On Sunday I timed myself through several rows. Almost every time I completed a row in slightly under seven minutes. So I once again got myself a pencil and paper and did some math. At seven minutes a row, with 330 rows remaining, I would be finished all the knitting in about 38.5 hours. With eleven days remaining, that meant that I needed to devote three and a half hours a day to this project in order to get it done in time.

Whew. That's a lot.

Typically, the very next day this schedule broke down. I was only able to swing about an hour and a half. And today I fell behind another seven rows. Sigh.

The good news is that it is still looking gorgeous.

Self-patterning socks for moi

These have largely been abandoned for the time being, in favour of deadline-driven projects, however, on Monday we had my oldest and dearest friend over for lunch and DH made me show her the coolness of the self-patterned yarn...and I started working on it. (In my defence, DH started it - he was working on my scarf.) My friend did wonder why I was working on the sock when I should be panic knitting on my grandmother's shawl, but I explained that the shawl would take too much concentration to pay enough attention to her, whereas I could easily converse and work on the sock at the same time. And then tonight driving home in the dark I figured I would screw up too badly if I tried to do my grandmother's shawl, so I whipped out the sock again.

Result:


Heel is complete.