Just yer average knitting blog entry

Last night I had a nightmare that I was out somewhere, and had a horrendously long wait for something, and I HAD NOT PACKED ENOUGH KNITTING.

Shudder.

Fortunately, that was not the case today. I made sure to pack lots of it. A good thing, because today, to everyone's surprise, the workers of Toronto's public transit system went on strike and I was worried it would take me a while to get home tonight. (I expected the volume of people trying to get a train ride north into the boonies would be way larger than normal. But it turned out to be about the same as always.)

This morning, DH found out about the strike after I left the house, and panicked. (Fortunately there was no need. By a completely happy fluke, I had to make my way into the city this morning by commuter train, run by a completely different service, and experienced no significant problems getting in. But he wasn't to know that for sure.) In his state of panic, he called my mom, who managed to talk him down by saying, "Look, don't worry. Wherever she is...I'm sure she's knitting."

How well she knows me.

Anyway, onto the comments...

Carrie K complimented me on the black socks for my dad - thanks very much. I agree, it's tough to find more to say about such socks than "serviceable". I mean, really, that's all I'm going for. They're not exactly wild and exciting, either to look at or knit. But I bet my dad will love 'em, and that's the key thing. (I'm also with you on the sheep porn thing.)

sillyewe complimented me on my Persian Tiles shawl project - thank you! I'm very proud of it. I think it's a gorgeous design (thank you, Jade Starmore) and every now and then, I must admit, I go back to the pictures of it and pat myself on the back once more.

Tanya, please be assured that your daughter is totally not alone with the getting-short-tempered-with-projects thing. I'm pretty sure my husband lives in fear of hearing my sudden, sharp eruptions of swearing as I'm working on something. :) That whole perfectionist thing can suck sometimes.

Aven, you are more than welcome for the sheep porn pictures and I am really delighted that they were helpful! Can't wait to see your finished product. But I do hope it will be a while until I have to go in for any more "intimate scrutiny of sheep parts". ;)

Thanks for all the comments, folks. I love hearing from readers.

Saturday night, DD began to cough. She then proceeded to get real sick real fast, and woke up constantly throughout the night crying pitifully because she felt so bad. Needless to say, there was no birthday party the next day. We have postponed it. To when, we're not sure. My poor kidlet.

The only bright side of this is that I put her down for an early nap on Sunday at 10am, in the hopes that she could do some extended napping and start giving those nasty germs some what-for. The child then proceeded to have an EIGHT AND A HALF HOUR nap. I can't tell you how much knitting I got done! Oh wait, yes I can...

Black socks for Dad

Done!


My first completed Christmas present. In May. Please don't kill me. :)

Self-patterning socks #2 for DH

Done!


I faced a little bit of a challenge on this. Because I wanted the striping on the two socks to match each other, I had to start the second ball quite a ways in from the beginning. That meant I finished the second skein before the second sock was complete (compared to the first sock). However, I was able to trickily use the extra from the beginning of the skein to mimic the rest of the patterning and thus, as you see, I have two identical socks. It meant undoing the cast-off of the first sock and redoing it so that the colours would all match, but that wasn't a big deal. Annoying, but not a big deal.

The most incredible part is that there is no yarn left over. NONE. Just the bits I snipped off after weaving in the ends. Unbelievable.

DH will receive them this Sunday!

Self-patterning socks for DD

Sunday evening I announced to my daughter that I'd finished her grandpa's socks. She informed me that this meant I would be starting another sock. How well she knows me. :) However, it soon became clear that she was talking about the second sock of the Grandpa pair. "Oh no, sweetie," I told her, "I already finished the second socks. Both socks are finished! Now I get to start a whole new pair of socks!"

She considered this information, and then informed me that, this being the case, I should be working next on finishing up her socks.

Excellent point.

So I got out the first sock and all the remaining little balls of yarn, and started figuring out how I could splice and dice everything to make the two socks match. I think I can do it, but it will all depend on how much of one part of the patterning sequence I actually have. Right now I'm working my way up the toe and will probably have the answer to this crucial question before I get halfway through the foot.


It doesn't look promising at this point, but there's still hope. As always, stay tuned. (I know, I know, how can your nerves stand all this drama.)

Self-designed baby hat/mitts

This week I decided to suck it up and keep going on the hat. So I did...only to discover that, ONCE AGAIN, I had put all the intarsia in the wrong place - it was all shifted over by one stitch. Again, riiip, restart, sigh.

And then, after that, it actually went smoothly. [Insert soundbyte of a chord sung by a heavenly choir of angels.] I cast off yesterday. Sadly, the most intense work was yet to come. The weaving in of eighty gazillion ends, for one thing. I still can't believe I finished it, but then, that is one of the advantages of having your daughter nap for eight and a half hours straight.

Now I'm in the process of duplicate stitching the brighter colours of the motifs all over the hat. Boy am I glad this is a small piece. But it is looking really, really good. I'm probably a little over half done all the embroidery. After that, it will just need to be sewn up at the sides and given a wee pom-pom. And then it will be done, beautiful, out of my hair, and off The Schedule.

Stornaway sweater for DH

Got a wee bit done on the shuttle ride to the GO station this morning and on the train home this evening.

Taupe socks for Dad

With yet another pair of socks off the needles, I cast on tonight for this pair.


The yarn is still looking more pink than I would expect from a yarn colour calling itself taupe. However, I wouldn't say that the colours in this photo are tremendously accurate. I'll try to get future shots done in natural light.

Heraldic tabard for moi

This got broken in over the weekend - we went to an event on Saturday, I brought it, and got a chance to wear it while doing some field heralding. It got many, many compliments, which was fantastic. However, the neckline really is way too huge. The thing just does not stay on my shoulders. I was joking with people that I was going for 'the eighties Flashdance look'. (1380s, maybe.) I'm nervous about doing Yet Another Felting Runthrough because a) I'm not convinced it would make a difference, and b) lengthwise, I think it's about as short as I want it to be - I would hate to pull the thing out of the machine and find that the neckline was perfect but the whole tabard became a crop-top! So I think what I'm going to do instead is knit a wide garter stitch neckband, which I will then felt by itself and then sew to the neckline of the tabard to keep the whole thing from slipping off.