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.