Friday, September 08, 2006

It's A Frog-A-Long!

Ribbet. Ribbet.
~ updated added 4:18 PM EST. Scroll to bottom to see!~



Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh but these pants have been asking for it for YEARS now!

I was all excited about them when I first saw the pattern in Interweave way back when. I even read up on Alison's blog all about her progress with them and dutifully printed out her modifications and carried all of that around with me (hey, 4-5 skeins of LB Homespun is a lot of yarn!) in a black canvas carryall everywhere I went. And I knitted.............and knitted............and eventually got to where the two leg pieces joined (at which point I smacked myself on the head and said DUH! Why didn't you knit them both at the same time to make sure your gauge was the same & that they would be identical???) and then carefully followed all of the recommended changes to make them fit even better on me than they looked on the model.... (yeah, right, there's a reason that some clothes only look good on the models & not on real human beings who have a good 10-20 pounds too much for their frame size packed on and who have bumps & wobbly bits where models only have firm sleek flesh.....)

Despite all of my good intentions and my actual joy in the colour of the Homespun that I picked out, I never got further than one front piece of these pants. I have the vague recollection of lookign at how much yarn I had left over & how much I still had left to knit and realizing that I wasn't going to make it with what I had.....and for some reason the idea of going out and buying another skein of roughly $4 Homespun just didn't appeal. I could see these things being SO unflatteringly bulky that I just wouldn't wear them....plus with the non-natural-fiber content I was also worrying that they wouldn't breathe - and with that realization the thought of wearing (essentially) plastic pants suddenly just wasn't appealing to me anymore.

So here they are in their long-halted state:
(oh lord and horizontal stripes on top of all that bulky yarn? What WAS I thinking????)


It is now quarter to three in the afternoon, EST. From three to four PM today my job at work is to sit in front of my computer and "be available" in case anyone needs any virtual reference assistance. My non-work job from 3-4 PM is also this afternoon to turn these half-pants into a large pile of yarn. Once I have done so I will immediately photograph & update the entry - - so stay tuned!!!

4:18 PM. PANTS FROGGED!

Man Oh Man but that was a lot of yarn I had tied up in those suckers!

It doesn't look like a lot in these photos, but trust me - it really is! I don't have a scale around in the library that is sensitive enough to weight yarn (we only have a book scale that starts around 5 pounds, and while the pants *were* heavy they were nowhere near 5 pounds!!!) so I can't give you a weight until later. But I figured I'd take a second shot of my 'new' yarn with something for scale......something that any knitter worth their salt will immediately recognize and totally *get* from a scale perspective.

Heh heh. I really like these colours - they're oddly gender neutral in a very nice way without being too (obviously) pastel yellow or green - because as someone who chose NOT to know the gender of her baby I can tell you I was woefully sick of yellow & green baby clothes! I'm bringing this up because I have some major baby clothes to knit - no not for myself! I know at least 3 babies who are owed clothes by me - one is {gulp!} almost a year old now, so he's not even a baby anymore! And I was thinking that this stuff would be the perfect ticket for some baby clothes... I had been debating the 'One Skein' bolero, but wonder if that will only fit a newborn....or if maybe I use the Homespun it would automatically be bigger just because of a large gauge and therefore would fit a child of - say - three months? I've also been considering the Holiday Knits pants idea - basically a pair of cute knitted cargo pants much like the pair seen here in Knitty... Hmmmm....those Knitty pants are done in Rowan's all season cotton........I wonder how they would look & feel knitted up using some of my majorly-huge stash of kitchen cotton?????


This is maybe a quarter of my cotton collection. Maybe.

Hopefully coming next week - an updated right-hand bar or maybe a total blog redesign including (yes Peggers, this is for you) a list of Future Works To Be Knitted.....starting off (of course) with The Ever Important Red Knee-High Socks! (Anyone know of a thickish red sock yarn that knits up like the wind? Nothing ickily acrylic, please - I tried Wool-Ease and was totally grossed out by the way that it squeaked.)

P.S. Thanks to kt for coming up with the Frog-A-Long idea!!!

5 comments:

kt said...

Bye-bye Plastic Pants...

Hello Homespun!

Congratulations--well played!

(I didn't find out about who Marion was when we were expecting either...Purple's a nice neutral, too, and I think ANYTHING in dishcloth cotton for a babe is tres cool.)

MandellaUK said...

Glad to see you had such a good frogging experience. Plastic pants - I don't think so.

Any ideas about what's going to happen to the yarn?

Anonymous said...

heeheehee
Don't you love how frogged yarn just becomes spaghetti? That's a lot of Homespun, whatcha gonna make?

About the cotton - all I know is that too much of it in one place gets Very Heavy.

Kate A. said...

Tee hee - this post cracked me up. When I saw that pattern in IK, I was seized by a desire to make it, mainly because I had *just* remarked to my husband that I planned to cover him in hand-knits from head to toe, and he had wondered what I was going to do for pants. So had I...and then I saw that pattern. I even had a couple skeins of Homespun in the stash, but I never got around to buying more, because I showed it to a friend, and she demanded that I knit her an afghan with it instead...I decided to make one following EZ's pi shawl design...and still haven't even done that much. But the thought is still hovering on the back burner...

Kate A. said...

Tee hee - this post cracked me up. When I saw that pattern in IK, I was seized by a desire to make it, mainly because I had *just* remarked to my husband that I planned to cover him in hand-knits from head to toe, and he had wondered what I was going to do for pants. So had I...and then I saw that pattern. I even had a couple skeins of Homespun in the stash, but I never got around to buying more, because I showed it to a friend, and she demanded that I knit her an afghan with it instead...I decided to make one following EZ's pi shawl design...and still haven't even done that much. But the thought is still hovering on the back burner...