Seven

Alright, at last, I make good on my promise to do the meme that Kelly tagged me with. Here we go...

Seven things to do before I die:

1. Have more kids.
2. Maintain a clean and organized home.
3. Write a book and get it published.
4. Stop having to commute for three hours a day.
5. Save or win enough money to stop having to worry about money.
6. Visit Spain.
7. Do a job I love.

Seven things I cannot do:

1. Speak Arabic. (Curse you, Mom.)
2. Resist really cool knitting projects. (But then, why would I want to.)
3. Golf. (Mini-golf is okay.)
4. Run long distances. (I'm a sprinter, when I run at all, which is, like, never.)
5. Hold a decent conversation with someone and adequately pay attention to my daughter at the same time. ('Mommy Hell', here I come.)
6. Cook and like it. (DH does the food around here.)
7. Be genuinely cool. (Total geek at heart.)

Seven things that attract me to my mate:

1. My eyes.
2. My sense of humour.
3. My ass.
4. My breasts. (Which I find strange, since this song could have been written specifically for me.)
5. My hips...okay, let's face it, he likes my whole body. I think he's nuts, but there you go.
6. My passion for life.
7. The fact that I am not perfect.

Seven books I love:

1. Anything by Guy Gavriel Kay.
2. Anything by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee.
3. Watership Down by Richard Adams.
4. Any one of the seven books in The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis.
5. Anything from the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling.
6. A Tangled Web by Lucy Maud Montgomery.
7. The one I haven't finished writing yet.

Seven things I say:

1. "I mean, really."
2. "Holy doodle!" (Largely reserved for DD's toilet training triumphs.)
3. "Son of a."
4. "Alia!" (Many possible tones of voice behind this one.)
5. "Woohoo!"
6. "Aw, crud."
7. Okay, really, what don't I say? Have you ever tried to get me to stop talking?

Seven movies I've loved:

1. Speed
2. The Fifth Element
3. Dead Again
4. The Princess Bride
5. Monsters, Inc.
6. Hunt for Red October
7. Can I count the 'Fresno' series with Carol Burnett as a movie? Please?

Basic Sweater for DD

Hooray! The knitting is finished!

Even more incredible, I had enough yarn to do it all. More than enough. This much more, even:

(hand included for scale)

This has me thinking. (Always dangerous.) There's not enough there to make anything else, really. But there is enough to do more rows on the body of the sweater. And I generally find baby/child sweater patterns to be short on the body (and simultaneously long in the arms, which is bizarre).

And so, despite the fact that I am only a few woven ends away from completing this project, I'm going to give myself more work on it. I'm going to: frog the bottom of the body back to the row before I decreased for the rolled edge; cut the yarn at that point and set aside the frogged yarn, which I know will more or less be enough for the decrease row, the rolled edge and the cast-off; join the leftover yarn (pictured above) to the body and keep knitting until I've done as many complete rows as I can with it; decrease for the rolled edge, joining in the set-aside yarn once the leftover runs out; knit the rolled edge; and cast off.

This should leave me with as long a sweater as possible using as much of the yarn as possible. The sweater will be a triumph of efficiency and, more importantly, will not be too short on my daughter. Hooray.

Now all I have to do is convince myself that I don't mind the extra work.

A Very Harlot Poncho for moi

I don't know where the needle for the Garden Shawl project is. And I don't know where the pattern for the Twizzle project is. And I didn't have time this morning to grab a needle gauge and figure out which one of the circulars on my couch is the 4mm I need to continue work on DD's Basic Sweater. And I can't take the Fafner blanket project to work because a) my co-worker whom it is for might see it and b) it's at the sewing stage, which is booooring.

So, faced with some desperation, I grabbed the Harlot Poncho project out of its storage tote and jammed it in my bag. Thus it saw some progress today. I'd forgotten how delicious it was working on this - yes, the loops in the yarn make it tricky, but the hand and the colour make up for it. Yum.

Textured cardigan for baby Harding

This week, one of my co-workers said she wanted to show me something, and then whipped out her ultrasound pictures. :) This will be her second baby (first baby received this), she's twelve weeks along and due in mid-October (a rockin' month for birthdays, say I).

I think I squealed. (I'm just like that.)

So...since this is definitely a person worth knitting for, I will be spending one of my allotted 2006 baby projects on her. I will be taking the opportunity to design another pattern for my book.

In fact, the designing and testing have already begun. Sadly, my first two efforts did not go so great, so I had to suck it up and test a larger version of the pattern. This is so there is more definition to the pattern, making the motif (hopefully) actually discernable to the human eye. This is not what I wanted to do, because a 21x21 design on a baby garment does not give you a whole lot of motif repeats. Which means I will likely be forcing knitters of this pattern to go blind by calling for fingering weight yarn and teeny-tiny needles. Sigh. We'll see how attempt #3 turns out.

What gives?

I have been very patient regarding the Yarn Harlot's latest book. However, this is getting ridiculous. I picked up her last book a mere 22 days into the month in which it was launched. Her new book launched this month, we're 28 days into it and STILL NO BOOK AVAILABILITY. I want to read it and I can't. This blows.

And I am having real trouble bringing knitting with me to work. This morning I realised that the tabard had reached the point where it was no longer bringable, since there were just ends to weave in, so I resolved to pack my Garden Shawl project...until I realised that it was not on the correct circular, since I'd gotten fed up with the stiffness of the correct needle and taken it out to try and relax it with a hairdryer or something. Where is that correct needle now? Heaven only knows where I put it. So, no Garden Shawl.

Faced with a time crunch by this point, I snatched up the bag containing the Twizzle cardigan project for DD and stuffed it into my bag. Only to realise later (too late) that the pattern was not with it. Where is the pattern? Again, your guess is as good as mine.

Bottom line: I suck! What the hell am I going to bring to work now?

Striped socks for moi

Fortunately, I at least had these in my purse to work on today. And...big trumpet fanfare, please...they are now done.


completed socks


'in action' shot


detail of the patterning on sock #1


detail of the patterning on sock #2 - similar but markedly different from that of sock #1

They look highly un-identical but are very comfy. All that's left is to zip off a notification to 200Sox.

Herald tabard for moi

Duplicate stitch? Check. Weaving in of ends? Check.

detritus leftover from weaving in all the ends (hand included for scale to show the true horror)


tabard, pre-felting (aka 'wearing my mummy's tabard'), plus one of DD's bouncy balls for added interest

Test swatch knitted in stocking stitch so I can see whether fulling will cure the curling? Check. Test swatch fulled? Um...no, not yet.

But I'm SO CLOSE.

We have the technology

This week I decided to discover Cast-On, the knitting podcast. I think I'd become aware of it through Franklin's blog, since he's done a few guest spots, and I was getting curious as to what it was all about. Plus, the idea of listening to knitting-related chatter while knitting really appealed to me - far less brain-melting than my usual habit of watching/listening to TV and knitting. This in turn led to the purchase of several rechargeable AAA batteries so that my MP3 player could come back to life.

Upshot: I like it. Brenda Dayne has a lovely voice, very conversational and soothing to listen to. She's a very positive, enthusiastic person and even when she rambles, it's eminently listenable. She also, as I discovered while listening, has the distinction of being the designer of the Mrs. Beeton gauntlets that I so covet and shall one day make. So I continue to make my way through the backlog of episodes (next up: episode #6) and, consequently, recharge those AAAs.

Self-designed teen girl top

Thursday evening on the bus ride home I sat near an overly-made up teenage girl (attached, as you might expect, to her cellphone). Usually, when on a bus with this kind of fellow passenger, I spend most of the ride being rather annoyed as well as feeling sorry for the friend on the other end of the phone whom she is using as entertainment because she cannot stand the notion of being alone with her thoughts (or, dare I think it, a book? some knitting, even?) for one lousy half-hour bus ride.

However, during this particular ride, I spent most of my time trying to figure out how her sweater worked.

She was wearing quite the interesting construction, I must say. It was all ribbed (2x2 from the looks of it, except for the sleeve cuffs which were probably 1x1) and the ribs ran horizontally across the body. Then, slightly below the waist it all somehow fed into some vertical ribs which were tight against her hips. The sleeves were excruciatingly large - this thing is meant to be worn with a tank or shirt under it, which thankfully, she was doing. The whole thing was very intriguing, and although it certainly wasn't something I would really care to have in my wardrobe, I'm sure there are loads of girls these days who would think it was hip and to-die-for, and would love to own it. The yarn had a bit of sparkle in it to boot.

So Friday morning I dipped back into my memory and figured out how it must have been constructed. I'm thinking of whipping up a prototype to see how it works out - if I like it, I might figure out different sizes and submit it to Knitty or something.

I'm thinking of calling it the "Like, totally" top. :)

Striped socks for moi

I detest that every entry about this project lately has been a crappy one- or two-liner just to bring you the scintillating knowledge that a few more rows have been worked on this. Sadly, today's entry is no exception. I can't even justify taking a picture to jazz things up because a) it wouldn't look too different from the last picture, and b) it wouldn't look too different from the forthcoming photo of the completed socks, either. Hopefully I will move along on this in short order and have the damn socks done before your brain shuts down from lack of stimulation.

Herald's tunic for moi

The lovely Aven reassured me with the wealth of her own felting experience that the currently-madly-curling edges of my tabard will cease to curl once felted. She then added, "you could always reassure yourself with a test swatch." How very true. And how well she apparently knows me. Because the more I thought about those words, the more I realised that I would not rest easy until I had convinced myself with real swatch experimentation that a plain stocking stitch edge wouldn't curl. So, sigh, I guess I will be knitting and fulling a swatch.

In the meantime, however, work proceeds very well indeed on the tabard itself. Today I stayed home sick from work and spent a huge chunk of the day sleeping off whatever nastiness kept me up most of last night with weird sinus happenings and a bad tickle in my throat. However, when not resting (or catching up on laundry), I managed to finish off the second sleeve, do most of the duplicate stitch on the trillium flower motifs, and weave in a lot of ends:

(tabard here pictured with our absurdly long living room sheers and one of DD's toy cars)

I am pleased.

Here is a close-up of the sleeve which has all the duplicate stitch completed:


Next up: more weaving in of ends, more duplicate stitch, and a test swatch to see if I need to do a garter stitch edge.

Glee!

So Franklin stopped by and commented, which just thrilled me all to pieces, since I am a big fan of him and his blog. :) At least, I'm assuming that it was this Franklin. I mean, how many Franklins can there be in the knitblog universe, especially considering that the comment appeared within 5 hours of my commenting on his blog? (I was imploring him to write a book. He really, really should. Heck, if he co-wrote it with his sister it could be titled 'Two Habits of Highly Effective Knitting'...okay, bad pun, sorry, I'll shut up...back to the topic at hand...)

Ahem.

So Franklin stopped by and commented. He loves my tabard, and he thinks it's cool that I'm knitting a tabard. I know this is going to sound wildly egotistical, but I agree with him. I also love the tabard, and it is cool, dammit. Even more cool is the fact that knitting a tabard means I dont' have to sew one.

And how is the tabard coming along, you may ask? Oh, let me tell you...

Heraldic tabard for moi

I have finished the first sleeve and have picked up all the stitches for the second. This means that for the moment, I am not doing any intarsia motifs, which means that I am much, much more relaxed. (I find that my knitting stress is directly proportional to the number of strands I am intarsia-ing with at any given moment.) Also relaxing is the thought that I only have one more of these motifs to do.


(the shot is fuzzy because the only way I could get the whole thing in the shot was by lifting the camcorder high over my head - whilst, I might add, already adding to my height by standing on my sofa, what can I say, the tabard is big and I'm short - and so the focus kind of blows)

However, I'm thinking ahead, and I'm concerned. Obviously, since this is one big stocking stitch monster, it is curling at all the edges like nobody's business. I think this might go away during the fulling and blocking process, but since my fulled swatch had garter stitch borders, I have no actual proof in my hands that this is so.

I have tried to find some before and after photos of fulled projects via Google, but I haven't been entirely reassured. In many projects, it isn't clear whether the edges curl before felting and uncurl bee-yew-tifully during the felting process, OR whether the pre-felted edges are not curling at all but are actually done up in garter stitch.

Does anyone know? Do I need to run a few rows of garter stitch around all my edges before I felt this thing? I have two obvious options, of course. The first is to knit and full an all-stocking stitch swatch and see what happens with the edges. And the second is to do a garter stitch edging all around the tabard just in case. But if I don't hafta do either of these things (especially since I might have to do both), I really don't wanna. Someone take mercy on me and give me a definitive answer? Please?

Striped socks for moi

Got a few rounds done on this last night while waiting for an appointment.

(Oh...and more glee...I just checked Indigo's website, and the Yarn Harlot's new book has changed status from 'temporarily unavailable to order' to 'usually ships in 24 hours'. A triumph. This probably means I will be buying and devouring it this weekend. Happy dance.)

Yay, a mid-week progress post

Self-patterning socks for I have no idea whom

Tumblina, you doll! I was thinking about using Google to see if there was a webpage out there to give me foot lengths for shoe sizes, but you just up and handed it to me! Ain't you nice. :) Thanks. You're right, it doesn't show foot widths and apparently my brother takes a wide shoe, but I can probably wing it.

So I sent my mom a picture of the socks in progress and asked her whether she thought my brother would like them. She said yes. My dad said no. AUGH! Now I'm even more conflicted. We were over at my parents' for dinner last night and I asked my dad why he thought bro wouldn't like them, and he confirmed my opinion - that bro will probably find them 'unmanly' (or, to use my brother's favourite expression for this kind of thing, which I absolutely abhor and tell him to stop using every time he utters it around me, 'gay'). But then again, said my dad, you never do know with your brother. If his friends think the socks are cool, he will probably decide they're cool, too. On the other hand, I asked my mom about the current contents of bro's sock drawer, and apparently it's all solid blacks and greys.

So conflicted.

Dammit. Maybe I'll just buy some more sock yarn in an excruciatingly boring colour and knit them up for bro.

Or wait...WAIT! Maybe...I'll switch sock projects...these ones could be for bro instead, and DH could have the new self-patterning ones! Apparently they both wear the same size shoe.

Except that last night, my parents started talking about this little project idea of mine right in front of DH who has no idea that the new self-patterning sock yarn is in my possession because it still might be a surprise present for him. I coulda killed 'em. The other problem with giving bro the grey socks is that I really do want to give DH some plain, solid-colour socks.

Sigh.

Maybe the self-patterning socks could be for my dad...his birthday is in September...

Heraldic tabard for moi

Over the weekend I finished the back of the tabard and joined the shoulders together. I used the three-needle bind-off for that, which I lovelovelove the clean look of:


Yesterday I really got going on the sleeve. By the time I got off the subway to go to my parents after work, I had finished quite a few rows of the intarsia motif for sleeve #1 and was feeling pretty damn cocky. Until the moment when I started folding up the work and putting it back into my bag. I suddenly realised that, since I was knitting the sleeve from the shoulder down and had been working the motif from the bottom up, that the damn thing was upside-freakin'-down.

There are no words.

So, after I put DD to sleep at my parents, I brought out my knitting, heaved a sigh, and pulled the needle out of the sleeve stitches in preparation for some frogging. My mom's eyes just about bugged out of her head...and that was even before I pulled out the first stitch. :) "What did you just do?!?" she exclaimed. Sympathies were extended once I explained my plight.

Now, however, I am knitting the motif with the correct orientation and everything's going very well once again. I'm past the halfway point of the sleeve:


If I keep this up, I might be finished this week's goal of finishing the sleeves by mid-week. That'd be nice.

Striped socks for moi

I'm about an inch into the top ribbing of the leg of sock #2.

O blogger, where art thou?

There seems to be an increasingly worsening trend around here of not managing to blog very much during the work week. This past week was the worst - I blogged on Sunday and here it is Saturday with the next post. Ouch.

A lot of it is due to concentrating on doing my chores and getting to bed at a fairly reasonable hour most nights. Sometimes it has to do with not having enough progress in my knitting to make a post worth reading. However, while these reasons are perfectly understandable, they sure don't translate into a gripped and scintillated reading audience, eh?

I will try to do better.

Starting with comments responses - rachel, you are a great cheerleader. I do feel awesome for not giving up on the Fafner blanket. :) I haven't done any more sewing since I last talked about it, but at least I know that the project is really and truly going to work. Yay.

Tanya, alas, we didn't know about Peter and Heather's housewarming today :( and we have other plans - my MIL and BIL are coming over for the afternoon/evening. (To DH's delight, they will be bringing dinner and saving him from having to cook.) It promises to be a lovely time but I must remember to hide my MIL's Christmas knitting before they get here!

At least, if I can't say I've been blogging regularly, I can say that workroom progress continues. The best news is that I purchased a hanging shoe organizer with clear plastic pockets. And mid-week, DH mounted it on the side of the fabric shelf in the workroom, and all my needles are now organized bee-yew-tifully, one size per pocket:

(I have had to slide pieces of white paper in the pockets to cover up the truly hideous floral print in the background, which was quite the disappointment to see when the thing arrived because the product photo had shown a white organizer. However, one day I will custom-cut white fabric and glue it to the inside of each pocket to make it look nice permanently.)

Isn't it great? This was a joint effort between DH and I. He thought of the idea of the side of the fabric shelf being a possible storage area for needles, and I thought of the idea of a hanging shoe cubby. Magic.

Next up: I want to go hunting for containers tomorrow to start organizing some of the other craft stuff.

Heraldic tabard for moi

The back is really coming along nicely. Here's what it looked like on Friday morning:

(shown here on top of the front for comparison)

Happily, it is even further along now - I'm only about two rows away from completing the heraldic motif. After that, it's just a few inches of stocking stitch, some neck shaping, and the back will be done!

Self-patterning socks #2 for DH

I haven't worked any more on these, but I did have a thought. What if, instead of making them for some unknown occasion for DH, I made them for my brother? His birthday is coming up mid-April. This would seem like the perfect idea. However, I'm still waffling on whether or not to do it because of two issues. One: My brother likely has bigger feet than my husband, so I would have to rip back the two inches of leg and the heel on the sock and make the foot bigger before turning the heel again. While annoying, this is a minor issue. The bigger problem is that I don't know whether my brother would actually like the socks. I think he would absolutely appreciate the gift itself, but although the colourway of the yarn has 'manly' colours like grey and black, the pattern might be a little too 'fussy' for his tastes. So I'm torn.

I think I'll ask my mom. I'd have to call her anyway to give me my brother's shoe size. (Anyone know how to translate shoe size into foot length?)

Striped socks for moi

The slow march towards completion continues. The socks now look like this:


It's kind of cheesing me that the two balls of yarn do different things with the patterning. See it? Part of the problem is that I pulled from the centre and the two balls variegate through the colours in opposite directions. But that's not the whole story. The second ball is doing something just a little bit different and weird and the socks, while very similar, do not match.

On the bright side, I'm only ever going to wear these things casually around the house or to sleep with, and they're not for someone else, so I'm not freaking out over it. But still.

Weekend progress report

Herald's tabard for moi

Back has begun. Not much to shout about, though, I've only worked one decrease so far:


The good news, though, is that I recreated the instructions for the sleeves (and realised that yesterday I wrote about figuring out sleeve decreases when I should have said increases...whoops).

Still behind on The Schedule, but at least now I'm forging ahead.

Fafner blanket for baby Whyte

This weekend the plan got put into action. I took note of how many rows were in the body of the blanket (146). I put all the stitches for the body on the row above where I was going to cut onto a needle. I then cut the intended row, leaving me with two pieces of blanket. I ripped back the bottom half to below the turquoise cable motif and put the stitches on a needle. I attached the new-found turquoise yarn to the edging and attempted to finish it.

I HAD ENOUGH TURQUOISE.

Barely. This is how much was left over:


Whew.

Then I grafted the cast-on and cast-off edges of the edging together. I counted how many rows were on the top section of the blanket (61) and calculated that I therefore needed to have 84 rows done on the bottom section of the blanket before I could start grafting the two pieces of body back together (61 + 84 + 1 grafting row = 146). I knit on the bottom section until I had 84 rows. I grafted the top and bottom together.

Unbelievable. It's all coming together. Literally - I've started to sew the body to the edging:


Not bad, eh?

Say what?

Kelly has tagged me for a meme. It was one I was hoping I wouldn't get tagged for, because I thought it would be too hard to come up with the answers, but I fiddled around with it and it turns out, I can answer them...except that I'm still stuck on the 'things I say' category. As soon as I come up with six more things that I say (I'm trying to think of them...and I've got my husband trying to think of them, too) I'll get onside.

In the meantime, let's talk about the fact that I will soon be stalking this book.

The release date for this book is listed as March, 2006. You may have noticed that it has been March, 2006 for some time now. The book is still not available in stores. However, I have been through this twice before now with Yarn Harlot book releases, and this time I was absolutely not expecting to have the book in my hands by this point. Let's examine the trends:

• Book 1: Projected release March 2005. Pre-ordered online. Mistake. They shipped it out at least a week after their stores started carrying it. I didn't get it until April 5. Elapsed time: 36 days.
  
  
• Book 2: Projected release September 2005. Hounded Indigo's online 'book availability' tool (so cool) until I found an outlet near my work that had it, and snapped it up. I got it on March 22. Elapsed time: 22 days.

It is therefore my guess that I will be able to get the new book in about two weeks. Two. Weeks.

What's with that, eh? I bet it's already available in American bookstores. #$*@#$*&.

Heraldic tabard for moi

A call last week? the week before? to the TTC Lost and Found department sadly yielded the result I was expecting - no one had turned in my pattern. However, on the bright side, my dear, darling husband went through reams of our recycling and found me the rough notes I had tossed. These, combined with my memory, were enough information to help me recreate the pattern. I still have to recreate the decrease instructions for the sleeves, but that can come later. I haven't saved the recreated pattern anywhere yet, but at least I do have two copies of it, which are not going to be in the same place until I save the damn instructions to my computer.

Yesterday morning I got back into the project and just finished the front:

(sorry about the weirdness at the bottom of the shot - I wasn't paying attention and got some of my shirt and the camera strap)

This is good, since I was supposed to finish the front last Sunday. I'm behind on The Schedule, so I need to start hustling.

Fafner blanket for baby Whyte

Briefly did some work on this in the last few days. Last night I ran out of the ball of turquoise one pattern repeat short.

I'm not done yet. My plan is to cannibalize the turquoise cable motif in the middle of the blanket. I don't mind doing this because I don't actually like the way the dragon head looks - it's too big, it makes the cables look like they've got a weird, huge lump on top of them. Rather than rip out over half of the body of the blanket and re-knit it exclusively in the cream, I'm going to instead cut the blanket body right above the cable motif, put the top on needles to prevent unravelling, frog down to the beginning of the cable motif, save the turquoise, knit the body back up in cream to where the cable motif used to end, and then graft the top back on. (Hopefully that description made some sense.)

The big question is, is there enough turquoise in the cable motif to do one pattern repeat on the edging?

Your guess is as good as mine. Sigh.

Basic Sweater for DD

I've been working on this a lot this week and I'm coming to the conclusion that, amazingly, I will probably have enough yarn. I did the entire yoke and worked about two inches down the body all with the first ball. So far with the second ball, I've completed one sleeve and am so far down the body that the beginning of the rolled bottom edge is about an inch away.


(although I think this was taken a little bit earlier in the history of the body knitting)

There is still a fair bit of yarn in the ball, and I can cut back on sleeve length because the completed sleeve looks a bit long. I know I'm tempting Murphy really badly with this, but I think I have a good chance of making it.

Workroom thrills

Welcome everyone, to another rivetting (well, of course I'm being sarcastic) episode of 'Workroom Progress'!

When last we checked in at Insanity Headquarters, the last of the shelves were being put up and a promising method of stash storage was being procured.

Today we are happy to report that all shelves have been assembled. Also, eighteen cardboard boxes were purchased. Unfortunately, they did not turn out to be the ideal storage solution that was originally thought. On the Staples website, these boxes are touted as being twelve inches deep and fifteen inches wide. They are, unfortunately, no such thing. In real life, they're bigger - and that's even before you put the lids on 'em. So there is no way that two of them will fit side-by-side on a single shelf. Unless...said shelf is the top shelf, so that the boxes are free to jut out at the sides.

Therefore, all stash boxes are being stored on the very top of the knitting shelves. Behold my consolidated, sorted and containerized stash, plus one empty box for expansion purposes:

(I find it amusing that my first reaction to seeing this was "Hmph...not too bad," but my mother's was, "Oh my gawd, dear, you have to stop buying yarn!")

Getting the stash tidily out of the way was a HUGE step. For one thing, it is incredibly reassuring to know where all my yarn is and where to find exactly what I want. For another thing, it enabled me to come up with this:

That is my first completely organized shelf. Yarn on top, then projects, then textile arts-related gadgets and some boxes full of yarn labels (yeah, I keep them, every damn one of them...it's a sickness, really), and then knitting books and booklets.

Isn't it purty? Ahhh.

(As a sidenote, I was shocked to discover, whilst organizing this shelf, how few knitting books I have. Seriously, look at that picture - that partially-occupied bottom shelf is the sum total of all the knitting books I own. That's just nuts. Clearly I must acquire more.)

The rest of the workroom continues to come along - more slowly than in the days of the initial frenzy of organization, but there is still definitely progress happening. For one thing, there is now a printer shelf in the computer closet:

That is a thing of beauty. Scanner and printer are now hooked up. We have a fully functional computer workstation in the freakin' closet. I love it.

I'm now mostly occupied in going through all the crap in the spare room and throwing out the dross before bringing the 'keeper' stuff into the workroom for further organization. This will likely take a while. But it is getting done. The challenging bit will be finding good homes for the 'keeper' stuff. I have given DH the mission of getting us a lot of tupperware-type containers, in a variety of sizes, on the cheap. These will be used to store all the smaller craft-ish items that now have no home - thread, paint, trim, brushes, buttons, snaps, bias tape, beads, ink, etc. etc. ad nauseum. This will be a huge help in making the shelves look great and be fantastically functional.

It's happening. It's really happening. In fact - dare I say it - a lot of it has already happened. Wow.

Scarf for DH

We have run into a significant snag. DD, obsessed with the idea that the re-cast-on stitches are her knitting, is not only refusing to let me work on it (well, almost never anyway) but also adamantly denies all offers of knitting help. She prefers to stick one needle into random parts of the knitting and wave it around while I work on one of my projects. Thus we are 'knitting together', you see. While this is all incredibly sweet, it don't exactly get the scarf done! Conversations to persuade her to get onside have thus been complete failures. Such as:

Me: Can I show you how to knit, sweetie?
Her: I am knitting!
Me: Wellll...not exactly, honey, can I help your hands to do it?
Her: No, I am knitting!

Sigh. I mean really, what else can I do - she's two. It's a wonder she's interested in the craft at all. I don't want to give her a complex about it or break her spirit by convincing her that she isn't really knitting, so...I guess we'll just wait and see if she gets more willing to do the real thing down the road.

Oh, and did I mention that she refused to let me hide the knitting when DH came upstairs at one point? Then when he came in the room she totally spilled the beans: "I knitting, Daddy! I knitting a scarf for you!"

At least she didn't say 'for Father's Day' or there is no way I would have been able to pass that off to DH as her merely making up a little fantasy of knitting him a scarf. But clearly we have a long way to go before we grasp the concept of 'secret'. ;)

Basic Sweater for DD

Sometimes, plans change.

You may notice the complete absence of this project on my list for 2006. It wasn't even on my ideas list for 2007 (yes, I have a preliminary 2007 list...shut up :). The impetus for this project just kind of came to me like a bolt out of the blue on Saturday. For some reason I plucked my copy of Top Down for Toddlers: No-Sew Knitting off my knitting book shelf (I love how that sounds...I have a knitting book shelf!) and thumbed through it. Just for fun. Not really looking for anything, just revisiting the book, flipping through, la la la... The first pattern, the Basic Sweater, didn't even remotely jump out at me. Until I started noticing the yarn with which one of the sample sweaters was knit. It was instantly recognizable as Magic Garden 'Buttons', which I've used before (and which also, it seems, does not felt) and really enjoyed. It's mostly New Zealand wool, very soft, with brightly-coloured polyester flecks here and there.

This put me in mind of another yarn I own, King Cole Sapphire Confetti DK. It is absolutely not New Zealand wool, it's acrylic (2% nylon), but it does have brightly-coloured flecks throughout it and a single boucle-ish ply to liven it up, and it's pretty cute. Very baby. I got it as a Christmas gift from my MIL when I was pregnant. The problem is that she gave me 200g of it. That's not enough to make a blanket, but it's way too much to make just one baby garment. Plus, it's mostly white, which I always try to avoid in knits for babies because it'll just get grungy. So I've been agonizing for years over what the heck I'm going to make out of this thing.

Fast forward to me on Saturday, staring at the Basic Sweater pattern in the book. Hey, I thought, you know, DD's growing out of some of her sweaters. She'll need new ones. And hey - I need to do something with that Confetti yarn. And hey - she's way past the spitting up stage and has actually been seen to be careful about spilling stuff, and some of her white tops do stay sorta clean. And hey, this will be a quick knit...

Next thing I know I'm casting on for the rolled neck.

There's just one problem: I'm doubtful that I will have enough yarn. I'm making the 4-year size, which calls for 6 50g balls of 123 yards each. Instead, I have 2 100g balls of 307 yards each. Logic dictates that I will be 124 yards short, which is quite a bit. Tough to fudge. On the other hand, patterns usually overestimate how much you'll need. And often, I find that sleeves in baby/toddler patterns are way too generous in length. And...and...and...well, to hell with it, I'll never know if I have enough until I try to knit the thing. Right? It's not like I've got anything else to do with this yarn. Right?

And so. Once again I have set myself up for failure.

I'm cutting corners, yarn-wise, where I can. For instance, I knit just 1.5 inches on the rolled neckline (the length for the 2-year size) instead of the full 2 inches that the 4-year size calls for. (The neck looks fine.) I scoffed at the need to have an entire row devoted solely to placing markers while merely doing more stocking stitch. (The top of the yoke looks fine.) That kind of thing. Also, as much as I would love to knit this thing continentally so that it would really zip along, I need the tighter gauge (read: greater efficiency with yarn yardage) that I get by throwing with my right hand. I'm figuring, if I can complete the yoke and one full sleeve before my first ball craps out, I'll probably be okay.



Famous.
Last.
Words.

Especially since I'm not sure I'm going to make that goal. At lunch I completed the increases on the yoke and gleefully continued reading the instructions, sure that I would be starting the sleeves. But no. I had to work another 2.5 inches of stocking stitch (248 stitches per row) before I could do that. Ball number one may crap out before I even get to the first sleeve.

Stay tuned for the universe giving me my come-uppance. It should be fun. (For the audience, anyway.)

Striped socks for moi

The slow trip up the leg continues.

Garden Shawl for MIL

I've probably mentioned it before, but I lovelovelove the shawl calculator available at Rose-Kim Knits. It tells me that I am now 8.3% done the body of the shawl. That looks like this:


Forgive my lame (and uneven) attempts at pseudo-blocking using only one hand and one foot, but otherwise it's just a noodly lump of silk and cotton.

Slacker

DH claims that the CD/DVD drive on our games computer is broken. Consequently he is spending much more time on the household computer, which I use to download pictures and blog. Hence the lack of entries recently. Oh, and also, I've been a lazy @$$. :)

But anyway...as long as I'm catching up, let's go to the comments. rachel made me feel infinitely better about my inability to start up the Garden Shawl properly on the first shot out of the gate. :) And I am thrilled to hear about the partial organization of her stash. That's awesome.

(My stash, incidentally, is now completely organized and stored. More about workroom progress in a future post, though, since this one is shaping up to be kind of huge. Suffice it to say that the news is pretty good.)

In other comments responses, christine, I totally lucked out with my husband - he is usually excellent at expressing sentiment. Which is why his insensitivity was not only hurtful, but also ridiculously surprising!

And Tanya, I miss seeing you in person, too. This living-out-in-the-boonies thing is nice on one hand because we love the house and the neighbourhood, but it blows on the other hand because a lot of the people we'd like to see more often are so far away. Sigh.

Finally in comments responding, I cannot help but mention 'NicoleW', who was flogging some website called...wait for it...'Fleshlight'. Now...although I have since deleted this delightful example of comment spam, I have found myself wondering - scratching my head, even - about this spam thing. Email spam is an entire industry. Avoidance of email spam is another entire industry. Now with the popularity of blogs, there is blog comment spam. And the whole thing just seems so damn pointless - I mean, does anyone ever actually respond to this crap? I think I even remember reading an article by someone who tried to respond to some of the offers they were getting just to see what the deal was, and couldn't because the contact information listed in the spam didn't even work.

Anyhoo...

(Apologies in advance...no pictures today.)

Self-patterning socks #2 for DH

Coming along very nicely. Heel of sock #1 has been turned and I'm about two inches up the leg. My speed rocks! I'm so happy.

However, I seem to have several choices as to when to give these socks to DH. The first choice - and sort of the original gameplan - is as a Father's Day present. But I have a better idea for that (see below), so that's already taken care of. The second choice is to wait for the next gift-giving occasion. Since his birthday is already taken care of with the dress socks, and I'm already planning to make him a sweater for Christmas, that means the next occasion is our anniversary...which is a year away. No WAY am I waiting that long to give him these great socks. My third choice is not to wait for an occasion at all but just to give them to him. That could actually be fun - I would just put them in his sock drawer and wait for him to notice. :) (Which he totally would, and then he'd go all vorklept.)

There's a fourth choice that's looking more and more appealing: I could give him two pairs of socks for his birthday - these ones and the dress socks. This might actually work pretty well since the two pairs colour-coordinate with each other rather nicely.

But right now I just don't know. On the other hand - who cares?!? These are really great socks!

Striped socks for moi

Compared to the speed I'm getting out of my continentally-knit sock projects, this thing is just crawling. I've turned the heel, but it seems like it's taking forever to do the leg. However, I will persevere.

Garden Shawl for MIL

An astounding thing has happened. I went through my collection of circular needles, and it turns out that I own a 3.5mm circular. I couldn't believe it! Now, it's 31" long instead of the recommended 24" that I'm supposed to transition to straight from the DPNs, but WHO THE HECK CARES. I ditched those DPNs like yesterday's garbage (partly because I had temporarily mislaid the fifth one and the circular was, at the time, the only way I could continue the project) and am now working in the round with the circular. At first it was something of a stretch, since the stitches barely went all around the needle, but it's getting better all the time the more I do since I increase by eight stitches every other row. This project is now starting to get fun. And also pretty. Pictures coming soon.

Scarf for DH

So I had this idea. It came from the fact that it doesn't make tremendous sense for me to give DH socks for Father's Day, since it's more appropriate for his gift to be from his daughter, who obviously would not have made the socks. But, I thought, what if his Father's Day gift was made by DD? With a little help from Mummy?

Thus I hit upon the idea. She and I could knit something together! It would have to be easy and quick, with big needles and big yarn so that her little hands would have an outside chance of being coordinated enough to do the movements of knitting pretty well, with Mummy's hands guiding her.

Well, some years ago a friend of mine was de-stashing, and I picked up three skeins of Belle Vallée Wools 3-ply Softspun, 100% pure Canadian Wool (two with labels, one without).

At the time I really knew nothing about yarn, I just thought, "Oooh, wool for cheap!" and grabbed it. But now that I know a bit more, I'm very happy with the purchase - the wool is soft and cushy and chunky. My only complaint is that it's a dun grey/brown that I would never put near my face. I've been considering putting it up for auction on eBay.

But, thought I, what if I used the label-less skein of this wool and some big needles, and helped DD to knit DH a garter stitch scarf? Whenever she gets tired of knitting it (which I expect will happen frequently), I can take over, and whenever she wants to work on it again, we can pick it back up together.

So a few days ago, speaking in whispers to drive home the point that it's all secret, I asked DD what she thought of the idea.

She is HUGELY enthusiastic about this. She loves the yarn. And so far she hasn't spilled the beans, although she has yelled loudly about "Father's Day!" and "My knitting!" with DH in the house.

We did, however, hit a bit of a snag tonight when I tried to start (while DH was making supper). The unlabelled skein is actually wound into two different balls (because the skein was big and the ball winder couldn't take all of it at one go). DD somehow got it into her head that the big ball was mine and the small ball was hers. So when I started to cast on with the big ball, she got really upset because it wasn't her knitting. I tried to tell her they were both hers, and both the SAME, for heaven's sake, but she was having none of it and she kinda...well...lost it a little bit. (What can I say, we're having sleep battles again these days and she's tired and whine-prone.)

So I ripped it out and am now casting on with her ball.

Once I'm done casting on, we'll sit down when DH isn't around and do some mother-daughter knitting. This promises to be fun. :) And of course DH will completely plotz when he's told that his kid helped to knit his gift.

Hee hee. I'm so eeevil.