Oh look, a bunny

Out of the five projects I profiled in my last blog entry, I've worked on only one of them since...and then temporarily shelved it. (It was the semi-secret project. The gauge turned out to be completely off. I'm going to have to rip it alllll back and redo my calculations from square one, which makes me quail, not because of the recharting - although that's going to be annoying - but because it is ridiculously hard to frog that Muppet pelt yarn I showed you.)

Instead, I got completely distracted by Janneke Maat's "Aragorn" sock pattern. I started it because I realised on Monday last week that perhaps I should be concerning myself with ensuring that my husband had a good present for our tenth wedding anniversary on the Thursday, and I briefly had delusions that I could do a pair of intricately cabled socks for him in that space of time. (Aren't I funny?) I got over that pretty quickly, but not before I had cast on for the first sock, and, since I took the day off for said anniversary, got to spend some time on it:

Isn't it fantastic? It looks like it just fell off of the needles at Rivendell, doesn't it? I adore it. The cast-on instructions in the English have a few problems with them, but after spending some time with the original Dutch instructions, Google Translate, and this helpful article from Knitty covering the tubular cast-on, I figured it out. For anyone who's interested, my findings are as follows:

1. The instructions state very clearly that you're supposed to cast on using the tubular method, but although you're given round-by-round instructions for the cast-on, at no point are you told when you're supposed to grab the purl bumps from the area where the provisional cast-on is. So I extrapolated that the grabs/pickups are really the "yo"s in "Rnd 1" of the cast-on.
   
   
2. There's some extraneous Dutch in "Rnd 4". Having looked at the actual Dutch instructions, I can definitely say that this Dutch bit in the English an accidental duplication, so don't translate it, don't worry about it...just IGNORE it.
   
   
3. The "purl the yarn over" in "Rnd 4" should actually read just "P1" (again, this is from having checked the original Dutch).

Other than that, though, I've found the pattern pretty darn clear. And I certainly love the result.

Naturally, though, this didn't end up being the anniversary present. (Birthday present, though - that's a definite possibility.) I sat DH down on the Tuesday evening and shamefacedly confessed that I was an idiot who had been focusing on other important things that have been happening lately, and that I was not planning anything particularly blow-out special for him for our tenth anniversary. He, in turn, confessed to exactly the same thing, and we then (with relief) made a pact that we would just get regular gifts for each other and not feel guilty in the slightest about it. :) After all, we spent the day alone together, and we're doing lots of other exciting things this year (like springing for a small vacation this summer for the first time since our honeymoon), so no one can say that we aren't marking this auspicious year for us by doing some really neat stuff.

His present to me, incidentally, was five skeins of Cascade 220 in a really nice red. I decided to make Quadrat for myself out of it. I tried briefly not to be distracted by it, but had cast on by the Friday night immediately following the anniversary. It was blocking by the time I went to bed last night:

Hm. Now what can I use to distract me?...

Stress

I don't talk about my day job very much here, partly because it has nothing to do with my knitting (aside from when co-workers are expecting and need knitted baby things), and partly because it's just good sense not to give tons of details about what's going on in the office. However, recently my job did start affecting this blog because my workload - thanks to the poor planning of others - became abso-friggin'-lutely HYUUUGE. Generally I am very good about being sanguine about office stress and leaving it at the office, but around late January/early February, things became truly ridiculous and the stress started to follow me home. Consequently, there wasn't a whole lot of blogging going on.

However, this is not to say that there wasn't any knitting going on. In fact, there was rather a lot of that, which was great, since it brought balance and sanity to a brain that kind of needed those things. :) I just didn't feel up to talking about it all.

But now that the crises (yeah, plural) have passed, things are exponentially better and I've finally gotten around to taking pictures. I can't show you everything, because some of what I've been working on needs to stay secret for the moment, but here's how the knitting is coming along.

Undergrowth for Jenn

When last we looked at this, I had emailed my friend to ask her if she liked the way the colours looked, and I was waiting for the verdict. Well, she emailed me directly and commented on the blog, and the result was a resounding "hell, yes", :) so I got started. I've since gotten a little sidetracked by other stuff (see below), so I'm not quite finished yet, but I have started the decreases and I'm pretty pleased with how it's going:



Although, in typical 'me' fashion, after having spent so much time upsizing it, I'm now worried that it's too big. But I'm going to try to have faith in the measurements I took of the hat liner that's supposed to go underneath this thing and ignore my nagging doubts.

Balaclava for moi

I don't think I made any more progress on this since my last blog entry, but at least I now have a picture:

Gryffindor Tie for DD1

In further preparation for the Harry Potter-themed birthday party coming up in late March for one of DD1's classmates, I found the perfect self-striping yarn, and a really good-looking tie pattern: Men's Bias-Knit Tie, from KnitPicks. I'm making it smaller than the pattern calls for because DD1 is of course not a full-size adult male. :) I don't know how well that'll work out, but I guess we'll see! I haven't gotten too far yet, though:

Secret thing

And then, in the middle of all this, I got an idea for a design that I just had to chart...and try out...and buy yarn to make the prototype for...and start the prototype...and...and...my goodness, I'm terrible at delayed knitting gratification! I want to submit this to a publication, so I'm not going to say much more, but I'm very optimistic about how it's going to turn out.

Semi-secret thing

So last weekend I headed out to my LYS to buy the yarn for the secret thing, and I took DD2 with me. June, the owner, hadn't seen her for a while and was delighted with how much she'd grown and, I think, her generally charming ways. :) She asked my kid what her favourite colour was (purple), and next thing I know, the child is carrying around three balls of purple "gift yarn" and June is suggesting that Mummy could make something for her out of it.

Okay, then!

I figured, since June was nice enough to give me yarn, that the least I could do was design a pattern she could sell (if she wanted to) in her shop. So I made something up. When I'm done, I'll print out some copies for the LYS, and will also make it available for online purchase here. I'm not going to give too much of it away just yet, but I can tell you that...



...parts of it look like a Muppet made the ultimate sacrifice so my child could have a new garment. ;)