Easter TONS

....tons and tons and tons of knitting was done this weekend, that is!

(Despite 6" of freakish snow, a 5-6 hour power outage,
and not being at home for all of Saturday and half of Sunday)

I'm actually a bit amazed myself at how much was finished! And I'm a s-l-o-w knitter compared to many (being the 'grabber' type knitter instead of the continental or other styles of knitters makes me considerably slower than most, I've always thought) - - yet despite my turtle-like tendencies with the needles here is what I managed to work on this weekend:



I finished my Green Tea Raglan and blocked it and seamed it all together. All is left is to finish weaving all of those hellish ends. I have also tried it on & happily enough it fits (!) altho' I do have to say in the sake of modesty I will buy a cami to wear underneath it before I actually sport it outside of the house.








I also did a ton of knitting on the Backyard Leaves Scarf using Gryphon's amazing yarn. This stuff is pure gold, lemmie' tell you - very very very soft (and passed my patented sniff test with its very first whiff!) and just lovely lovely lovely colours all melded and melted together. It is actually due to Gryphon's lovely yarn that I credit actually finishing the first half of the scarf, as I rapidly grew tired of the pattern repeat after about, oh, the 6th one. Finishing those last two (you do 11 repeats before finishing off the pointy end) took some serious discipline! I'm guessing, however, that my lack of enthusiasm was not because of a failure in the scarf pattern, but rather because I did all of this scarf knitting in a day and a half. I will cast on for the second half very soon - I have determined that I will finish one pattern repeat every day at the very least - which means that the scarf will be more of less done in a week and a half. PLENTY of time to make my Mother's Day deadline!

I interspersed the scarf knitting with some Icarus knitting - -

(my progress shot taken outside Saturday afternoon during the power outage!)

- - my Jaegerspun Zephyr from Sarah's Yarns came stunningly soon after ordering it - - I ordered it around 1PM on a Thursday and it was literally on my doorstep time-stamped by the UPS guy at 12:40 PM the very next day. Talk about the speed of light! The yarn is wound for you by the Sarah folks - - they take their huge-mongous cone of Jaegerspun and wind off 2 ounces for you and then sell you just that 2 ounces at whatever percentage of the total 1-pound cone price would be. In my case that came to just $5 and some change per two-ounce ball. Can you believe it? Apparently they're a bit controversial in the yarn-retail world because of this practice, but as a person who literally snorts out loud when I read People magazine or US magazine and see the prices on those "designer" bags or "designer" jeans that celebrities wear ($700?????? For a pair of JEANS?????? Unless they magically turn my ass into a size 6 and do the dishes for me every night, I'm hard-pressed to shell out $70 for a pair of jeans!!!) this discount pricing model sits just fine with me, thankyouverymuch!

(Above is a progress shot taken this morning - I've finished the first repeat of Chart 1...the outside shot above is much much much more true to colour than this particular shot - something about the indoor light plus the grey-ish background - that is - it's grey in real life! - just washes out the intense intense intense robin's egg dark blue that is truthfully is...)

The bugger part of the Icarus story is that I also ordered an Addi bamboo size 3 (24") needle to knit it on, but decided to go w/ the size 3 Addi (16" - one of the circs that I use for socks) that I had to get started. You know - starteritis - I totally couldn't wait until the longer needle arrived in the mail......until yesterday when it actually did arrive and I slapped my forehead in disgust. I already HAVE a size 3 Addi (24") needle (turns out those sock needles that I bought were in fact ALL 24" long!) - in fact, that was exactly what I had been knitting the sucker on in the first place!!! So now I have three Addi naturas size 3 in 24 inches. I just didn't bother to check & measure (or heck, even READ the packaging!) before my silly self went crazy online ordering with reckless abandon. So now what do I do? Do I try and send it back? Do I even think that 24" is remotely long enough for such a huge shawl in the first place - so do I try and send it back and ask them to send a 36" long needle instead? Do I offer it in a swap to a friend? Do I burn it, offering it up to the gods in an attempt to prevent future Online-Knitting-Supply-Ordering Stupidity???


This morning I also started organizing my current batch of projects. Below what you see is nothing other than my patented "circular needle method" - which for me means that anything remotely small that I knit on a circular needle I stuff in one of these $1 Target bags that I bought over the summer and keep labeled (and therefore organized, as in my world this counts as organized!) with little ring tabs. While I haven't yet started Seraphim, what I currently have in that particular bag is a freshly-wound yarn cake of the Handpaintedyarn skein (didn't like the skein too much, but love love love the yarn cake!) and a pair of Knit Picks Options, size 5.

Pointy little suckers, those.

Ketchup

Sorry - I'm hungry - that should really be *catch up*.

Quickly, as I've got about 15 minutes to myself before I need to run - so just the basics:


My Green Tea Raglan bamboo sweater: I'm down to the last few rows on the front - and already the back & sleeves are done. I'm so excited about this - my first adult sweater (for me!), and out of cool nifty bamboo nonetheless. I'm going to block it and seam it and try it on before deciding if I should knit the little belt or not.

The weather here is finally turning nice (with this weekend being a nasty, cold, drippy, wet exception!) and so I'm anticipating lots of fantastic wearing of this perfect mid-weight sweater in the next few months.





Next, I have a picture of Gryphon's yarn that she so kindly hand-dyed me to knit the Backyard Leaves scarf with. Isn't it AMAZING?????????

It should arrive in the mail sometime this week, and as soon as I'm finished with the sweater (Friday? Saturday? Sunday?) I'm going to start right in on it. Looking at the lace chart I know already that I'm going to have to translate the chart from chart form into column form instructions, but that's okay.


Icarus:

Yes, I'm going to knit Icarus, but not for my retiring co-worker, but rather for my wonderful Grams who I am going to see in May. I **just** ordered 2 skeins of Zephyr Wool-Silk in Agean Blue (shown obligingly in the pic below from Miss Ewe Knits' Blog) from Sarah's Yarns and lo and behold not 5 minutes later (!!!!) I received an e-mail telling me that the yarn has been shipped via UPS Ground and they even included a tracking number. Holy shit!!!! I also ordered not the Addi Lace Turbos that you see in the picture below as they're sold out pretty much everywhere I quickly looked but instead a pair of Addi Natura circs, size #3 from Angelika's Yarn Store, where I've heard the shipping is almost as equally fast! I'm a bit bummed that I couldn't find the Addi Lace needles, but as I love love love the Addi Natura needles and know that I'll use these for ever and ever and ever I'm not really that bummed. Besides {snicker, snicker} I know that once the Addi Lace needles stop being *the* thing that everyone wants I'll buy several pairs eventually!




And what, you might ask, am I going to do with the yarn I bought earlier that I had intended for Icarus?

SERAPHIM, BABY, SERAPHIM!!!!!

Here is a beautiful example that I found on Knit/Wit's blog via her posting in the Seraphim KAL (which I joined, right along w/ the Icarus KAL, of course!) - she did hers in KnitPicks Gloss - I think that this is going to be incredible in the hand-dyed deep blue laceweight that I got for my co-worker!


Well, my 15 minutes are up - time to grab my book and run over to my trusty reading spot so that I can digest my necessary three chapters in the time allotted before I get to run back and sit desk for two hours.

The good part of today, though? Getting to have dinner tonight at a local Vietnamese/Thai place w/ a candidate (never met the candidate & never eaten at the new restaurant!) and then green tea raglan knitting once I get home and bath/bedtime is over! Peggers bought the Keven Smith 2-disk set (his tour around various college campuses) and we watched part of it last night - it is HYSTERICAL! Fantastic knitting watching - great listening, loads of laughs and interesting stories, plus as it's so interesting it keeps me awake - and therefore knitting! - long past my normal bedtime of 10:15 PM!

A Hookup Needed

I kept thinking about this idea all weekend, and mused to myself that I sounded like a druggie......

"I need the good stuff!"

"I need a hookup."

"Hey man, do you have any of the primo stuff that I can score?"

(Gryphon's hand-dyed silk in 'Foxtrot')

...however in my case what I need is 450-500 yards of worsted-weight yarn in a subtly variegated shade suitable for a leaf-themed scarf.


You see, sitting at home 2 weekends ago I was feeding the Munchkin bites of mushroom & cheese omelette (he out-ate me by about 2 helpings!) and listening to Sunday Edition on NPR when I heard a news story about a local-ish woman whose son had been killed over in Iraq...........and how the first anniversary of his death was coming up on Mother's Day. Sitting there listening to her talk about her loss, and her struggle to not only come to terms with such a impossible thing but to also how she tried to console her remaining two children as they tried to figure out how to live with such a loss absolutely crushed me. Sitting there with my little guy eagerly eating mushrooms and proudly showing me how he could fork up a mouthful with only a little bit of spillage (cutlery skills are high-up on his list of Things I'm Proud Of at the moment!) I sat and listened and just cried. Particularly on hearing how this mom found out the news of her son when some Marines walked up to her while she was gardening outside on a lovely spring day.............and thought how that all too easily could have been me. How maybe possibly if the Munch decides to go against most of what I believe in (being raised a Quaker and therefore quietly and vehemently anti-fighting) and what his father would undoubtedly council - how it could even actually be me someday.



So I tried to think of what to do. I just couldn't get that image out of my mind - that of a woman working in her garden, surrounded by the warm smell of dirt and seeing little fat seedlings pushing out of her garden, having these strange men walk up to her - and having her probably know immediately what it meant the second she saw them.

So - lacking anything else to do - I thought I'd knit her something. I figured that anyone who was working in her garden in May was probably a basic nature-ish person - and so something nature-ish based would be appreciated and possibly even worn. Which made me think of leaves and trees and shoots - - which made me think of the Backyard Leaves scarf by Annie Modsitt in Interweave's Scarf Style book. I looked through my stash, and didn't see anything that would fit - as this is an Important Knitting Project and none of my acrylic-ish beginning knitter yarn that I have steadfasted refused to throw out and so still remains in my stash even came close to being nice & important enough.

(Another hand-dyed silk of Gryphon's - this one her 'Flamenco' colourway)

So what I am doing is asking for any and all recommendations & potential yarn 'hookups' that I can get. I know what they recommend for the scarf, but I think that the Karabella Aurora 8 is only ho-hum when placed against what I **could** knit the scarf out of. See Gryphon's examples for what I mean.......altho' there are loads of folks out there (Jessie, Sundara, Handpainted Yarn, etc.) who could also serve as excellent examples of the kind of truly primo yarn that I'm talking about. (I'm just guessing that Gryphon won't sue me for pirating her images to use in this post without first asking for permission, hence why I went and shamelessly stole images from her Etsy shop!)

;>

A set of retirement wings

One of the more wonderful & lovely members of my library is retiring in a year or so - - and I've been looking into and talking about making her a knitted shawl for the past - oh - 6 months or so. However nothing ever hit as being "perfect" and so no decisions were made. Until today.

Brooklyntweed posted about some hand-dyed yarn of his from the Handpaintedyarn.com folks - - so I went over there to explore and clicked on the 100% wool laceweight stuff..........and oh oh oh look what I found:


Isn't it just BEAUTIFUL? 950 yards and $5.95. Can you believe it?

And what - you might ask - is it eventually going to be transformed into?

Icarus, of course!

To be 100% sure that I'd have enough to make a BIG shawl I purchased two skeins. Shipping included it came to $16. I laughed - seriously - the food purchase I made this week for my 4-committee group to consume during 10 telephone interviews came to $36.

Ohhhhhhhh but this should be fun to knit - and even better, with no deadline looming it'll be a fairly leisurely knit as well!

Wee Tiny

My sock is done! I knitted it last night while watching about 1/2 of The Holiday (Jude Law, Cameron Diaz, Kate Winslet, & Jack Black). I'd only give this movie a B - and that's because Kate Winslet is in it - - otherwise I'd give it a C. Jude Law does okay - but it's a role that I just can't get my head around him in because in the movie he's actually a decent guy - and his escapades in the Real World suggest otherwise! Cameron Diaz is ditzy and far too cookie-cutter stereotypical - annoying, almost. Jack Black is Jack Black - not given enough screen time to actually become the character in the actual movie - and while I like Jack Black well enough, he can be annoying in large doses. Kate Winslet is lovely as always - I wish that she lived in town so that she and I could go for coffee and chat, and I could hang out at her house & try and figure out how she brushes/styles her hair so that it always looks so good without actually looking like she spent too much time on it (in my world, spending more than 5 minutes on your hair is Too Much Time) - and maybe even raid her closet.........you know?

But anyway - I digress.

I knitted the sock first on size 1 dpns, then after wrestling with them for about 10 minutes (keeping in mind the entire time that the whole knitting exercise was only supposed to take about 60 minutes!) I ripped them out & off and re-did the whole thing on two circs and was much much happier. I did a basic k1tbl,p1 ribbing for the top then did the leg plain then switched back to dpns and did a garter-stitch heel then turned the heel then used the dpns to pick up the stitches for the gussets (and here I probably would change the pattern for myself and next time pick up 7 instead of 6 stitches, as I had a hole at the top of the gusset which I can sometimes kinda' avoid by picking up an extra stitch just to be extra careful at that super-tricky spot) but then switched back to circs to finish off the foot and the toe.

I used some leftover hand-dyed Sundara sock yarn in Dusk. Hey, if you're going to do a swap, better do it w/ the good stuff, right?



Then this morning I came to work and wrote a nice little letter to my swap pal and addressed the envelope and sealed it and then spent an hour out at the reference desk where I actually had a chance to look at blogs again for the first time since last Friday............and when I got to Emily's blog I realized that -DUH!- I had totally forgotten to take pictures of it. So I went back to my desk, hauled out my letter opener, and staged a few photos, then tucked the sock back away yet again and sealed the huge slice in the envelope with some good old sticking tape!

Man O Man O Man but this week has been a brain-frying sort of a time.................

I shall mail the wee tiny package off to it's intended pal tomorrow - oh what fun what fun what fun - and what a lovely lovely lovely Emily to come up and then also be willing to coordinate all of this!

I'm going to go now and post my picture to her Flickr group - and then go home and start watching my mailbox!

:)

I really should be working.......

.....but I'm not.



Today is the Munchkins' birthday - it is so so so hard to believe that my little colic-ridden bundle is 2 years old! Old enough to demand birthday cake at the merest hint of a icing-laden sugary slice! Old enough to sleep through the night - even if he chooses not to on an almost-nightly basis. Old enough to try to put his own socks & shoes on. (He doesn't succeed at it, though.) Old enough to pretend that the rolled-up bamboo place mat is a sandwich and the coaster is a pancake.

This was maybe, oh, at 4 days old.
Never, ever since has he again been this quiet.

So this afternoon I'm not working. I'm catching up on major, major blog reading after an insanely busy week & an insanely busy morning. I have pushed so much work around and finally off of my desk today plus done so much online grading & reading that now my eyes actually hurt. So what I'm going to do is post here, then leave work a bit early so that I can hit the health-food store and then go and get the little wee one - if you can call a 2-year old (who is both so tall & so verbal that he is routinely mistaken for a 4-year old child, even by those who have children themselves) 'wee' and take him home & play with him & read to him to his heart's content because it is - you know - his birthday. And if you can't have a fairly decent day on your birthday - particularly at this young an age! - when can you????

But first, I post.

I post of All Things Heather & her drive for donations to raise money to buy books for a South African school. As both a reading freak in my own right plus a militant mommy who makes the Munch read (not that I have to make this child read - he demands it on a nonstop basis!) plus a librarian plus someone who used to live in Botswana for a bit (the country above South Africa) - this donation was a no-brainer. And getting yarn as a result? A total bonus - but I would have done it w/out the yarn.........

Next I post of Emily.

Who sent me a lovely little wee-est treasure in the mail. I was overwhelmed last night when I got home from work (the Munch was still sleeping when I went to get him at his daycare provider's house - yesterday was Dance Day for the kids at daycare who are old enough, which correspondingly meant a very very late nap for the little guy and not nearly enough sleep!) with temper tantrums and making dinner and just being exhausted in general, so I didn't open Emily's padded envelope until today. I made myself wait and let the excitement build - plus I wanted to open it in an environment where it was nice and quiet and I could actually read Emily's letter and understand it instead of being interrupted every other word with requests for reading yet another Maisie story, more milk, dump truck location clarifications, or comments about the dog barking.

My sock. My lovely, soft sock that is knitted so

well - even at this small size - that it has no holes in the gusset!!!

It is lovely and beautiful and too cute for words - and this from someone who is most certainly not a fan of things generally considered twee. I have it currently very very carefully tucked in my front pocket - both because I like to reach in my pocket and feel that it is there, and also because I am showing it to - generally - every single person I see today. I ran to E's blog and read all of the posts of hers lately that I had missed and signed right up for her Wee Tiny Sock Swap. I am so excited, I can hardly wait. I'm hoping to get an International Swap Pal. Just because I love those funky stamps & foreign accents are just SO cool, are they not??????

So now I have posted. So now I go. This weekend should be just lovely - warm warm warm (well, warm considering what we've been putting up with lately!) and time alone w/ the Peggers and time to garden and time to knit and maybe even some time to throw open the windows and doors and air out the house and let in the Fresh Spring Air!

(a girl can always hope, can't she?)

Anatomy of a Sunday

8-ish AM: Wake up and exchange pleasantries with Munchkin & Peggers. Agree that while today looks quite cold, it still seems like it will be - ultimately - a Very Nice Day.

9-ish : Roll ourselves downstairs.

9:30-ish: Pancake breakfast, courtesy of Daddy/Peggers!

10:30: With grocery list in hand make our way to grocery store for week's worth of shopping. On list are ingredients for lunch this afternoon with Kim!!!

11-ish: Standing in grocery store watching husband get very Very VERY frustrated due to overwhelming number of absolutely stupid shoppers all getting in our way. Look for refrigerated pizza crust but can only find frozen. Figure that I can make it all work in the end by lunchtime, regardless.

11:15: Realize that the frozen pizza crust takes 4-6 HOURS to thaw........................Kim is due over for lunch in 45 minutes. Begin to majorly panic.

12 noon: Crust is thawed thanks to some major quick work by Peggers - ragu is simmering on stove top & oven is pre-heated. Still, major major panic.

12:05 PM: Kim shows up & pizza goes in the oven - springform pan - double-crust stuffed with with ricotta/mozzarella/parmesan then topped with home-made ragu composed of chicken sausage, mushrooms, celery, carrots, garlic, onion, and tomato. Bake at 425 degrees for 15 minutes then top with loads of cheese and bake for another 20 minutes.


1:10: We sit down to eat, and Munchkin has a few bites of his lunch then gets too tired & asks to be brought up to his crib for naptime. We continue to eat double-crust stuffed pizza after he retires.

2:05: Leave for the Barnes & Noble knitting group meeting.

2:30: Meet Gryphon and lovely baby Lia. As my friend Rachel had told me in an e-mail, Gryphon really & truly is far too lovely a human being to have recently had a baby - if not for Lia strapped to her front in a baby sling I wouldn't have believed it myself! (3 months after the Munchkin was born, I wasn't calm, collected, happily knitting in a group of women at roughly the speed of light, I was frantically pushing my screaming bundle of colic around in a stroller - hair unwashed - wearing the same clothes that I'd had on the day before - wondering if things would ever get better and terrified that things in fact were as good as they were going to actually get for a long long long time.....)

4:15: Inquire as to the time & realize that the hour and a half that I told Peggers I'd be gone has stretched to two hours and fifteen minutes. Invite Kim & Gryphon & Lia back to my house for tea/more chat.

5:00: Kim takes off to finish her homework.

5:15: I start making dinner - marinated steak & potato soup with spinach.

5:45: After talking her ear off, my manners finally catch up with my brain and I think to offer Gryphon something to drink. Nursing mothers = fluid depletion = MAJOR THIRST. To think that I could have forgotten this is something that I was quite embarrassed about!

6:15: Gryphon and Lia pack themselves up and leave, after lovely lovely lovely talk between the two of us that covered topics from knitting to mothers to babies to Americans to genetic biology to co-workers to silent films.

6:17: Munchkin & I wave goodbye to Gryphon & Lia as they drive home.

6:18: Walk into living room and stare at my husband in disbelief. "How on earth could I have not thought to invite Gryphon for dinner????? I stood there and cooked an entire meal in front of her and never even had the intelligence to ask her about it. I have the manners of a basket of dirty laundry these days!!!!!!!!!"

7:15: Take soup pot off stove & walk it to center of dining room table. Open bag of pre-washed spinach, dump in pot, and stir in. (Heat from simmering broth wilts spinach just enough so that spinach is cooked but not overly so!)

7:16: Set table, pour drinks & round up Munchkin & Peggers for dinner.

7:20: Finish settling Munchkin & get him eating his applesauce & crackers & blow on his soup to cool it.


7:21: Peggers spoons up his first bite of soup as I move to do the same.




7:21.5: "WHAT THE HELL IS THIS???????????????????????????"


7:22: Peggers looks up at me & promptly spits out his mouthful of soup.

My first thought: Oh lord, it was hiding in the bag of spinach.

My second thought: Thank GOD I didn't invite Gryphon to dinner!!!!

7:32: Eat roll & half a hot-dog as rest of meal - Peggers eats a bowl of Cheerios.

8:15: Put Munchkin to bed.

8:35: Drink two glasses of much-needed wine and eat half a container of chocolate ice cream as proper dinner while watching Stranger Than Fiction with Peggers .

10:15: Bed, after a very very very strange day.

The Fastest Shawl in the East

I was sitting around about two weekends ago, mere hours off the high of ordering two sweater's worth of yarn in one slightly expensive sitting, when I decided that I needed a teeny weeny project - something to knock off quickly and keep me on my knitting high between ordering the yarn and actually having it show up on my doorstep.

So I focused on my paternal grandmother - Elaine - who had her 90th birthday just this past fall - and went looking in my stash. I dug out the remaining hand-dyed silk/rayon blend that I had ordered from Interlacements last year for K's clapotis and did some mental reviewing of patterns that I had wanted to try out, and so settled easily on the Shetland Triangle from Wrap Style. Knitted so amazingly by Brooklyntweed in some Sundara hand-dyed worsted-weight yarn. (No wonder, huh, that these two talented people could combine to make such a stunning end product!)

I was - of course - impatient as anything to start it, but I waited until Sunday morning rolled around and then checked to see when the local public library opened to check out their copy (which I knew that they had!) - but when I saw that their Sunday AM opening was in fact 1 PM I balked and so grabbed the Munchkin (Peggers was sleeping in late that morning thanks to extreme kindness on my part!) and we hightailed it to Barnes & Noble. Luckily for my bottom bank line they did not have a copy in stock, so I cooled my heels until 1 PM at which point I flew to the library, snagged their copy, flew back home and started knitting! (And N.B. - I'm glad I did wait until I got the library's copy, as other than this particular shawl there is nothing - and I mean N O T H I N G in this book that I like even remotely!!!)

I cast on for the shawl on size 7 needles around 1:30 Sunday afternoon - and finished the shawl Tuesday evening after I got home from work - taking a break only to suffer from a 36 hour stomach flu that rendered me incapable of anything more than one single line of knitting Monday afternoon on the couch! I knitted until I thought it was large enough, realized I had gone one pattern repeat too far (leaving myself far too little yarn to finish the 14-row edging chart and cast-off!) and so ripped back easily, picked up my stitches, and happily did the 14-row edging chart and then cast off with just a wee bit of yarn left to spare.

Of course it looked like a bunched up piece of colourful netting when I finished...but I did my normal thing. Soaked it in Eucalan & cold water (I know it isn't wool, but the lavendar Eucalan like I've got is the loveliest thing out there so I use it regardless!), then pinned it out on a towel on the bed like I normally do (blocking wires and loooootttsss of T-pins!)

and left it overnight to dry and once again the Lace Gods smiled down on me.....and voila! From a tangled netting-like mess to a lovely shiny gleaming shawl that was popped right in the mail and sent off to lovely Grandma Elaine who happily received it just a few days later and called me right away to thank me.Nothing like a happily-received gift knit that was made in 2-3 days out of stash yarn!

Another catch-up Post

I had finished a post & hit the 'Publish' button only to see it show up several posts back on my queue list - - I'm guessing that's because I had started and saved it as a draft back at the beginning of the month. But no worries - at least it's THERE and can finally be read!

Still nothing but dire medical news from home these days - so I'm knitting and fretting and trying to find something useful to do that doesn't involve buckets of wine, slabs of chocolate, or else walking across the entire damn state in an attempt to give my worrying/fretting nogging a break. Luckily knitting at least distracts me a bit. I'm still working on R's hat and waiting for our Artyarns Royal Silk order to come in. Hopefully tomorrow - Saturday at the latest!

In the meantime, here is a very brief FO - a knitted purse that I made for my mother-in-law as a thank-you for coming to spend almost an entire week with the Munchkin while he was (happily) ill with rotovirus. Not only did that require her to change extremely disgusting diapers, but she also did some of her son's laundry - really more than anyone could have asked for - and all for free, to boot! So who am I to not make her some sort of thank-you present?

(and I should note that my sewing skills aren't fantastic, so while the 4-hour knitting of this was a breeze, I might have mumbled a few curses over the inexpertly-sewn in lining....so please be kind when you review that particular aspect of it!)

Knitted from a basic pattern I found in a knitting magazine whose name I currently can't remember. Not an Interweave - one I found in Barnes & Noble and fell upon in a knitting-magazine dry spell frenzy. It even has this purse on the cover - in bright blueberry blue. If anyone is really that curious I'll look it up for you - just ask.

She likes pink - luckily! I used one strand of something fairly chunky found at Michael's along with a strand of pinky shiny stuff (a Patons brand, if memory serves) along with at the same time. Happily enough she loved it - so all ended well in what will probably be my one and only purse-knitting attempt!

Woefully Behind

I am terribly terribly behind in my posts - I have been a virtual knitting MACHINE lately - - I'm on my third Shedir, and have started the Green Tea Raglan out of my plum-coloured bamboo (a yarn that is everything - and more! - that it was promised to be!!!!) Before I finished the 2nd Shedir I knocked out a knitted & lined purse for my mother-in-law and between finishing the 2nd Shedir and starting the third I also churned out a Shetland Triangle shawl for my grandmother in a mere two days.

I am on FIRE.

(whose knitting skills I am drawing on to do all this, I have no earthly c-l-u-e!)

Luckily, though, while I'm behind on posting I at least have pictures of everything and will try my absolute best to post as many descriptive and picture-laden posts as humanly possible this coming week. Happily enough I'm not planning on having a second bout of the stomach flu (what happened to me LAST Monday morning from 2-6:30 AM!!!) and so should not miss work and correspondingly be behind at work for an entire work as a consequence....and so should have loads of time to post & wrote & edit pictures.

But in the meantime I'll leave you all with a picture of the new yarn that lays immediately on my horizon - and the best part? I didn't even have to pay for it! (Of course, neither do I get to keep the finished product, but that's okay - I'm totally willing to sacrifice long-term gains for short-term greedy-animal gratification!)

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...................I can hardly wait to get my hands on it!!!!!!

I Don't Believe I Just Did That

I'm totally jumping the gun here, as I have a post edited & 90% written, just waiting to be posted, and I finished a Knitted Object yesterday (started & finished!) and have pictures of that to show you too, but first I apparently must post about what I just did.

I got the new Interweave Knits mag (Spring) in the mail yesterday and looked through it last night between the hours of 12:30 and 4 AM during which I was up with my son as he played in our living room. (UGH!)

And today, while at work, I went online and bought yarn for two sweaters I saw in there yesterday. TWO.

I just hopped online, did some comparison shopping, and then hit "Add To Cart" and bought a grand total of 18 skeins of yarn.

Man. O Man. I never EVER do stuff like that!

(should I blame it on the lack of sleep and cold that is slowly but surely overtaking my body?)

I bought 5 skeins of SouthWest Trading Company's Bamboo in Plum - the most amazing colour that will just be so much fun to wear. Plus the yarn should be incredible - all of the raving reviews really sold me on this stuff - plus 5 skeins of it (and 5 is buying one too many, but better to have one extra than be one short, right?) at only $12/skein is MUCH better than buying the pattern-required Classic Elite Bam Boo - at $7.50/skein but having to buy a whopping THIRTEEN skeins! (Classic Elite comes at only 77 yds/skein, but SWT Bamboo comes at an amazing 250yds/skein!!!) A grand total savings of over $30.

The Bamboo in Plum is for the Green Tea Raglan by Cathy Payson that is on page 56 of IK.

Which I will present to you here & now:

I've been dying to knit (myself) a raglan for AGES now - and I adore adore adore the way that the designer contrasted the smooth knit of the sleeves with the seed stitch of the body - and the way that there is a teeny slight break between the body & the shaping stitch before you hit the sleeves.......well I could go on & on. Simple as anything yet stunning, I think - and while I know that someone of my hourglass-type shape needs to wear v-necks to help keep me even more shape-focused and defined I think this boat-ish neckline will still look nice on me - and the knitted belt (if indeed I decide to go ahead with it) will help to add definition to my waist even more.

So, that's sweater #1 - I can HARDLY wait to get cracking on it!!!

Sweater number two lept out at me almost as quickly. I sat and stared at the sleeves a bit until I suddenly realized that I could ignore the extra cable on the sleeve that was so distracting to me and that would make an already-incredible sweater all that much more incredible (although bearing in mind Emily's advice about designers throwing in extra stitches to compensate for the amazing way that cables pull in a knitted fabric I might need to swatch a bit and cut back on my number of sleeve stitches correspondingly!) and with that realization I was a goner again for a second time.

(Now just think about this - how many times have you seen a sweater in a magazine that you just loved and how many times have you gone out and bought the yarn for it RIGHT AWAY? I've never done it - never! - and today I did it not once but twice!!!

Sweater number two calls for 8 skeins of Gems Worsted at $14.50 a skein - a grand total of $116. NO WAY. I know it's a cheap hobby when you break it down by time spent and total cost per minute/hour/etc. but still. I couldn't bring myself to do that. So instead I went looking for worsted weight substitutes and remembering a favorite blogger's passion for elann I went looking there and found myself just drooling over their Peruvian Pure Alpaca - but what colour? The price was certainly VERY right - and I needed 13 skeins due to slightly shorter yardage per ball but still - at $3.98 per ball you do the math and realize how much I was saving on this sweater by again switching yarns! I looked at all of the colours and then looked at the top of the page where they had some already-knit items and saw this picture below which is apparently the 'Lift & Separate Cardigan' from Amy Singer's Big Girl Knits. Also knit in Peruvian Pure Alpaca and the colour just LEPT out at me........

But which colour was it? Was it in a now-discontinued colour, or was it in a currently available colour and due to monitor differences I just couldn't really tell which colour it was? I thought I knew - but a look at the colour card that Elann offers made me doubt myself. So I spent about 45 minutes looking all around all over trying to find out WHAT colour this sweater was knit in and then simply decided "oh the hell with it!" and went ahead and bought myself enough yarn in their 'Celery' dyelot and figured that probably no matter what I'd be happy with any shade between what seems to be the two that I keep finding in my searches.

But which sweater is it ultimately for, you ask?

Why, the Cable-Down Raglan by Stefanie Japel, of course!

The part that I don't like on the sleeve is the simpler of the two cables - the ones that appear to be on the 'sides' of the arm - both front and back. Makes it far too busy to my eye and really detracts from that most incredible cable that runs down over the to of the shoulder straight down to the back of the wearer's wrist. So I'll take those cables out and it will - I think - make the sweater look all that much more incredible because of it. And the way that the simple cables on the back of the sweater pull it in like a corset? For a curvy girl like me that's how you spell love love love in wool!!!

So - that's what I did and that's how I spent the last four hours..............between answering reference questions and putting more paper in the printer, of course!

;>

Twisted Stitches and Peacocks

(Editorial Note: This is a Catch-Up Post that I had started but not posted from about, oh, 3 weeks ago!)

I tried to take some pretty pictures of my past Shedir-in-progress hat - - as after all one of my New Year's resolutions was to do a better job on the photo front in '07. Now granted, I'll never be as good as Mr. Brooklyntweed (nor will I ever be able to purchase a camera as expensive as the one he apparently owns and uses!) but still, I could most certainly improve from my more-typical "stuck wherever it happens to fall" type shot of the past. So I set up my 3/4 finished Shedir and started snapping away........and you know of course what immediately happened, don't you?

(You can see his little feet at the top of this particular pic. To say that he was a wee bit annoyed because I was taking pictures of something/someone other than HIM is a serious understatement! He kept putting his head in front of/behind my knitted object and saying !!!!CHEESE!!! while squinching his eyes completely shut and baring all of his teeth. His classic 'photogenic' smile of the moment............)

So anyway, this is the Shedir That Was. This particular hat is now long finished, washed, blocked, and gifted - and my friend said that her sister (34 years old, 3 weeks past brain surgery to remove a huge tumor plus one of her inner ears, currently residing in a nursing home where she will stay and recover for another 2-3 months) was thrilled with it. Didn't register what it was at first, but once S put it on her head for her and adjusted what little hair the surgeons left in a more normal style under/around the hat she said that she just BEAMED. And S, normally an extremely reticent sort of person, was actually so happy that she hugged me as thanks when she told me all of this. So most certainly worth ripping out several rows (several times, if truth be told!) to get the cables RIGHT.

I have moved on to my second Shedir - and am pleased to say that now that I totally 'get' the way that these cables work I no longer have to read the pattern - and as such the 5 main pattern repeats literally FLY by. I'm already to the decrease section after only 2-3 days of working on it.

Here is the one and only artsy shot of the second Shedir that came out barely decently enough to share - this one for a co-worker's mom who was diagnosed with liver cancer several months ago and is finishing up treatment and just now losing her hair...

I found out that 100% ktbl stitches is the only way to go on cables when it comes to my knitting - makes everything a zillion times more crisp & clean. Likewise I wish I had done the ktbl when I was doing the k1p1 ribbing - and I also wish (!) that I hadn't done the tubular cast on for it. While it looks LOVELY - and was a good thing to practice and learn how to do, it is a bit less stretchy than my normal Twisted German cast on and therefore isn't (I don't think) quite as good.

Happily enough my stepfather is going to benefit from all of these lessons - his hat is a Twisted German cast-on with 100% twisted stitches from the very get-go. Unhappily enough his first chemo treatment hasn't done what we had hoped & been told it would - and rather than significantly cutting the pain it has left him in even more pain with laryngitis and increased weight loss to boot - only 3 days after treatment. He goes in to see his doctors tomorrow and I'm hoping that they'll be able to admit him to the hospital to properly treat the pain - as the combined Vicodin and Morphene that he's currently on just isn't cutting it. Dark days indeed.

These socks were finished & gifted weeks ago - and the recipient (another Susan!) told me just last week that she is absolutely in love with them. Soft as soft can be (Emily's gift of Shaffer Anne didn't go to waste!) and warm warm warm - and with last week's temps of 8 and 10 degrees she needed warm feet! The pattern is one I made up myself - but please, I followed a basic sock pattern (64 sts) - did a feather & fan pattern down until they were anklet length - then did a basic eye of partridge heel flap, turned the heel, then picked up & decreased until I was back to 64 stitches. Then I did a.....oh, what is that called...............a toe where it decreases in a large spiral. I used the description from Nancy Bush's Knitting Vintage Socks and followed it to the letter and just adored the way that it turned out.

A work in progress shot still on the needles...................

And a Finished Object! I adored the way that the decreases went when I decreased down from picking up stitches along the heel flap. Such a crisp clean diagonal edge!

Of caps & rotoviruses

The Munchkin is finally better. After looking at his symptoms we finally realized that he had come down with the rotovirus - which can be potentially quite nasty and hospital-stay requiring - - so on the grand scheme of things we actually got through with very little damage done. Things started to significantly clear up last Friday, and by Sunday he was back to his old self, and Monday happily saw him running into his daycare provider's house screeching out the names of his buddies at the top of his little thrilled lungs. Being at home with Mommy & Grandma for a full week is BORING compared to hanging and playing with like-aged friends all day, let me tell you!

I, on the other hand, simply sagged with relief at the QUIET once the door closed behindThe Munch and Peggers Monday morning - so much so that I ended up simply sitting with my borrowed laptop at the dining room table drinking coffee and catching up on library e-mail and work until roughly 2 PM, at which point I realized that no - I was not actually going in to work that day! I did get in some knitting while I caught up on e-mail and work (of course!) and was happy to report that Tuesday morning around 11 AM I slipped the very last stitch of my first Shedir off the needle. It is a beautiful beautiful pattern - and the end result is quite lovely, even if the colour wasn't necessarily one I would have chosen for myself. In my delight I - of course - cast on the second hat that same evening - but this time I took a nod from Brooklyntweed's post about starting his second Shedir and tried a tubular cast on for it. And while I love the tubular cast on's smoothness and...........unique tube-y look, I'm a bit worried that I'm not going to have enough yarn to finish (it was very very close last time around!) and that the tubular isn't a stretchy enough cast-on for a hat. However as I ripped out a good half of the first Shedir (not all at once - I'd knit about 15 rounds, rip back 3, knit 8 rounds, rip back 4, etc. ) before I really got the hang of it, I know that this particular type of Rowan is some Very Tough Yarn, and can take being cast-on, knitted, and ripped without any harm.

So while things were still a bit on edge (unhappily enough Peggers had picked up the Munch's viral unhappiness, so not everyone here at Chez Pointy Sticks is feeling well at the moment) things were at least peaceful.

Then the news came that a PET scan had just been ordered by the doctors, as they now suspect that the lymphoma is actually originating from an organ or bone - which would mean an automatic diagnosis at Stage IV and I was reeling again. So I went out and paced the streets around campus for an hour to get my brain to shut up, and then went back and was able to get some work done..........and came home hoping for a nice quiet night and a fire in the fireplace (as the forecast was for night-time temperatures of 18 degrees!) to calm me down and keep me just enough on the sane side of things to function........only to find a frigid domicile and a broken furnace.

These Are (Bad) Days. (To quote Natalie Murchant & her horde of Maniacs. )

I had chocolate and red wine for dinner after the Munch went to sleep.

So the emergency technician came after a frosty two hours of waiting (thank GOD for wood stoves!) and fixed it........and we woke up this morning to a thermostat registering 61 degrees but that was set to maintain a temperature of 67. So another call went in to the heating people & I ran to work, loaded up the laptop again with some new necessary software, grabbed my thrilling book on Copyright Law, and came back home to haul a ton of wood into the house to keep the stove stoked up on high all night if need be, cleaned out an entire half of the garage, moved an eighth of a cord of wood from outside storage to in-the-garage storage (despite being off the ground & covered by a tarp, our outside-stored wood was growing MUSHROOMS.............anyone want to guess why the wood was mostly smoking instead of burning? Hmmmmm???????????), emptied all the garbage cans in the house (7!) and did two loads of laundry. Then sat down at the dining room table again with my trusty laptop and created fairly boring web pages about Copyright Law and what that means for faculty and their classroom activities.

I let our lovely friendly technician in when he showed up, happily heard the heat kick on (by then I was FREEZING - for despite the wood stove's best efforts it was a chilly 57 degrees in the house!!!!) and somewhat-less happily heard him tell me that it was a stuck pressure valve...which they didn't have in stock, and would have to order, and which wouldn't be in until tomorrow. But 'sokay, as he showed me how to whack the faulty valve with the handle of a screwdriver if it decides to get shirty with me between now & then.

My kind of technician!!!!!

So now Peggers is home early and I have a whole 20 minutes to do another few rounds on my second Shedir before he and I toddle off together to get the Munchkin - and as it's his night to cook that means that I get to play play play with my little one while he figures out dinner (or takes us out on his dime - either one is fair play!) and then after dinner it'll be time for bath and then after bath it'll be time for bed and then after bed it'll be time for me to watch a movie (I checked out both Hedwig and the Angry Inch plus All About My Mother from work) while doing some more knitting.

So today is turning into a Much Better Day and much less of a Very Bad Day than it could have seemed this morning around 8 AM. For which I am very very grateful.

But I still have no pictures to show you - as I had my act together enough to load all of the software on the laptop, but not any knitted cap (or sock or vest) pictures!

Soon - I promise!