Knitting Knitting Knitting Knitting Knitting

It's been busy over here! Quiet, I know - but busy.

I finished my Snicket socks. Hopefully maybe possibly I'll get a proper F.O. photo shoot in sometime soon - because they are simply too beautiful & lovely to let this over-exposed, badly-angled shot be their only representation.

I changed up the heel to suit myself.

I started a new pair of socks - a very soft (both in shade & texture) pewter grey Baby Ull superwash in a brioche rib for my dad, whose feet are always painfully cold. Hopefully some handknit socks in a nice squishy brioche'd wool will help to fix that.

My new Sundara yarn came in for my May Sock Swap & it is lovely. I wound it up right away and it now sits in a large, satisfying yarn cake in my knitting bag. Again - apologies for the excessive flash - tough to take naturally-lit pictures at 9 PM, you know?

The tiny yarn tail off to the right is probably the most accurate colour representation.

On the May Sock Swap front, I have been working on getting the ribbing right for the new socks. I thought I had it, and happily cast on with the above yarn and had 2 " of ribbing done and the first few rows of the lace panel insert, but then found out that I was wrong. Luckily, knitting with the Sundara yarn is so fun, I don't even mind ripping it out and starting again!

And in fun & exciting 'design news' - I'm working on a design for Gryphon with of her amazingly beautifully heavy Icelandic silk. A lovely, losely-spun single in the most gorgeous shades of fiery red and orange and even pink.

Here is a wee snippet of my swatch blocking over the weekend:

That's all for now folks! Life has been exceedingly hectic, and my work ethic has been - shall we say - not exactly up to par lately - so I'm trying to make up for that this week. So less posts from me for the next few days, but never fear - loads of knitting will continue on at home behind the scenes to be revealed at a later date.

What a Pal What a Pal What a Pal

Munchkin in earlier, non cold-season days.

January & February so far seem to belong in 2007. Now, I have high hopes for the improvements that will begin in 2008. Now I just have to wait for 2008 to actually *start* for us - you know?

One of the Troubles (I feel so Irish to say it like that!) involves my husband and his insane vituperous work environment - so the less said about that and the sooner it is behind us the better. So far it is - probably - approximately 3/4 behind us and hopefully will fade to a vaguely disturbing memory in a few months.

The second current Trouble involves the Munchkin. Unfortunately the little guy's respiratory system never quite cleared up after his battle with bronchitis/pneumonia a few weeks ago. Tuesday night he started coughing and wheezing and panting - and was up for most of the night in misery (despite the prescription cough syrup with codeine that we had given him!) - so Wednesday the doc squeezed him in and gave him a through checking-over once more. The upshot is that the middle lobe of his right lung probably never cleared up completely from last time - so he's on some whacking meds for a few days plus (and this is the true kicker) a nebulizer twice a day for two weeks then once a day until sometime in March/April when winter is really and truly over and cold/flu season is past us. No permanent damage to his lungs yet, but the doc wanted to be over-cautious and kick the living crap out of this and make sure that every single thing that could cause his lungs to close up could be dealt with before it even became a problem - all to prevent him from having problems into adulthood. Fairly scary to hear! At least the chest x-ray was clear. The first nebulizer treatment went very very well last night and the little guy slept like a champ all night. This morning's treatment went well also - amazing how bribing him with an old Disney cartoon will get a 2-year old to sit still for 10 minutes! - and so that's a great relief for everyone.

Through all of this - with the help of the first season of Medium from my public library - I've been knitting. I have also been knitting with the help from my wonderful, lovely, and talented Sockpalooza Pal - Ava. Just LOOK at what she sent me a few weeks back!

My very own little WIP bag! I absolutely ADORE it - I love the fabric, I love the size, I love the length of the drawstring - I love everything about it! And handy? This sucker is handy. It perfectly holds a skein of sock yarn, two sets of size 2 circs, and your single finished sock.

I'm not paying attention to the pattern for Snicket anymore, as I've got it memorized, but if I needed that paper tucked in there, my trusty T.B.S. - W.I.P. bag would hold it!

A also sent some other goodies. Like this adorable blank notebook with the funniest cover ever. I adore this woman. I'd love to be this woman in this life - so svelte. So adored. So obviously intelligent and self-contained. So able to properly apply makeup. However I'm not really that sort of woman in this life - so I'm instead content to think that maybe possibly I was that sort of woman in a past life.

A also sent me this in my Goodie Package. When I opened it first thing to a totally random page this is the quote that I read:

"Learning a new craft will make you chatter on incessantly about the art form. Be careful not to bore your less artsy friends." - the Clue of the Leaning Chimney.

How is that not absolutely perfect for every single obsessed knitter/crafter currently out there????????????

Collective Nouns

.................a sleuth of bears, a murder of crows, a flange of baboons, a smack of jellyfish, and.........

a colony, creche, huddle, parcel, &/or rookery of penguins!

(isn't English just too funky & funny?)

One finished Wonderful Wallaby sweater for the Munchkin. Complete with over-exposed shade of green wool from my camera being too close to the photography subject when the flash went off!

Taking pictures of this particular FO was neigh impossible. He just would *not* hold still that morning - no matter how I asked, threatened, or bribed. So alas, these horrid pictures are the best that I can do.

He seriously digs the 'roo pocket in the front. Not only can he fit both of his hands in there (and Look! Mommy! My hands touch!!!!) but he can also fit a small blue toy motorcycle in there along with the motorcycle's rider - a yellow plastic figure of Dr. Fate. Life Is Good.

The first sweater that I made the Munch was a intarsia rooster sweater knit with Debbie Bliss yarn that cost upwards of $70 and took me at least 8 months to knit. This one I knit with three skeins of a wool/acrylic blend that I scored on absolute clearance for $0.85 each and took me a grand total of 12 days to knit. Penguin included. Luckily I chose the right size when I knitted it - I knitted my 2 year and 10-month old son a size 6T sweater. And see how well it fits him with nary a too-baggy hood or too-long hem anywhere to be seen? Thank goodness I went the less expensive route this time - what a 6T-sized sweater - with hood - knit out of D.Bliss would cost these days isn't even worth contemplating!

p.s. I called The Woolery yesterday to see when my wheel would ship out. I was - stupidly - hoping that if I called and asked about it again that I'd somehow (magically) get a different answer. But no - the very friendly woman who answered said that typically they ship out in just a few days, but they're currently so backlogged from Christmas that they're days and days behind - so hopefully maybe they'll make it in the mail to me by the end of the week, and if not then next Monday or Tuesday. Of course as I was greedily hoping to have the wheel arrive, like, today, hearing this for a second time was just as disappointing as the first. So I am knitting my sorrows away - a snicket sock, a green tea raglan (GTR take two! This time out of alpaca instead of droopy bamboo), and a pair of plain-knit socks. Not very thrilling, but at least it keeps my hands busy while I peer out of the window waiting for the UPS man to *not* stop at my house anytime soon....................

To keep the Munchkin and myself busy this weekend while Peggers is up the road for an All Boys Weekend, I thought we'd make a batch of these. Don't they look just too yummy? Perfect for that weeny little snack when you need to either eat a nibble yourself (or in my case, satisfy someone else's desire for a weeny little nibble) without ruining your dinner!

One of my 2008 Knitting Goals

It actually has nothing to do with knitting, but more with blogging.

Just to blog more frequently. No biggie - I'm always thinking in 'blog post' terms anyway - now all I need to do is actually type it up here instead of just letting it moulder away in my head.


Wednesday Updates:

Despite this picture
of my Snicket Socks mocking me in their barest beginnings, I actually was able to finish casting-on for them a few days ago and thanks to the Munchkin's bizarre desire to be awake from 3:30-7 AM Tuesday morning (g-r-o-a-n!) I've finished almost 5" of the leg already! I love the pattern - it is beautiful and looks tough, but is really easy as hell. Seriously now - isn't that the way all knitting patterns should be? And the yarn from Sundara is just too stunningly beautiful and complex (colour-wise) for words. To say that I'm thrilled with these little suckers so far is putting it very very very mildly.

My Snickets mocked me because dinner that night totally flummoxed and threw me. Normally my time in the kitchen is fun and easy and relaxing - and in a Very Unfortunate Turn of Events (hah! get it? Snickets? Unfortunate Events? Ahhh - nevermind!) a straightforward recipe threw me for an absolute loop and I ended up with a struggle and a disappointing outcome.

My fridge looked like this after the debacle was all over
On the shelf above the eggs are two muffin tins full of meatloaf muffins. A very easy (and very tasty!) recipe from Rachel Ray that I snagged via the Food Network website. The recipe went awry because I put in about a quarter pound too much ground beef and not enough extra breadcrumbs or egg to compensate - so rather than eat meatloaf 'muffins' we ate meatloaf, ehrm.........paste. Once dinner was over and we were done scraping at our plates with our spoons (groans at the memory) I put both of the tins into the fridge in an effort to chill & firm these little puppies up. It worked - a bit - so that I could at least get them out of the tins and into some storage containers for better, proper, longer-term storage. But 'twas very frustrating - especially as how it was supposed to be such a straightforward dinner, leaving me loads of time to knit on the socks while everything baked away happily & quietly in the oven. Instead there was chaos, mania, billowing smoke from the oven vents, me beating my head aginst the wall, smoke alarms pealing all over the house........you get the picture!


And last but not least, a postcard that the Munchkin got from my inlaws while they were on a cruise to New Zealand and Australia over Christmas.

Awwwwwwwww.........

I tried to get them to bring me back a Majacraft Rose, but they said no-go - apparently it was a bit too big to fit in the overhead compartment or under the airplane seat in front of them or some such malarky like that....... :)

newly converted

For ages now I've been listening to everyone rave on & on about the Mason-Dixon knitting book. How fantastic it is, how brilliant the two authors are, yet every time I'd open it (while shopping/sipping coffee in Barnes & Noble) I'd flip through some pages, and then put it back, a bit puzzled as to what all the fuss was about. Then the other day, in my shrug-knitting-starting-designing frenzy I went to the public library to snag some Nicky Epstein books (hey, I've never knitted a ruffle before, and I wanted to be sure that I was going to do it right!) and there was M-D Knitting right next to my outstretched hand........so I added it to the pile. And over lunch I browsed it and was thoroughly entranced - not only the ball band washcloth but also the log cabin examples (and those mitered squares!) but also the possibilities of calamari knitting. That is when you take very looooong loops (think about cross-sectioning the body of a t-shirt into long loops about 1" wide) and chain them together then roll the whole long thing into a ball and knit up the resultant "yarn" with huge-mongous needles. In such a way you can recycle old t-shirts into lovely things like placemats, cushion covers, bathmats, rag rugs, etc. And you don't have to sew any rag strips together or other such malarkey! As Peggers owns roughly 500 extra t-shirts that he doesn't wear and doesn't like and totally need to be rag-bagged, this is a perfect project for the fall - and as t-shirts all take dye fairly well anything that comes out a blah-ish colour can easily be tweaked to a nicer shade with a packet or two of Rit dye and a spin in the washing machine. What fun! So after a read or two I'm now a Mason-Dixon convert. While I might not buy the book anytime soon, I'll most certainly check it out again from the library - ditto with their next one which is due out next year!

I also spent the weekend working on my shrug with very very very disappointing progress. The shrug that I ultimately fell in LOVE with and am absolutely dying to make is the Belle Shrug by Laura Chau. It's available via Lettuce Knits, yet so far I have yet to hear back from the shop (I contacted them via e-mail.) I know that I can guesstimate how the pattern is put together, but I'd really rather read it for myself. However this is a moot point, as I know that I need about 1,000 yards of yarn for it - and I have only 665 yds of alpaca to work with (either the grey or the brown - take your pick.) Which means that I need to go stash-diving to make up the difference - and here is where I'm TOTALLY stuck.

I sat and stared at various skeins and balls of yarn for two whole days - trying to figure out if one colour or another would work - or trying to figure out if I could dye some yarn a different complimentary shade instead. Above you see the most likely contenders. The chocolate alpaca (currently the winner in my "what yarn for the body of the shrug?" contest) you can see wound into a huge yarn cake, while the other remnants cluster around wishing they could be that big & mighty.

In the photo above you have (clockwise from the alpaca): a ball of blue/white twist wool wrapped together with a strand of what looks to be alpaca in a light blue shade; a lovely ball of pink bamboo/merino Sockpal sockyarn that was hand-dyed for me courtesy of Jessie at Piece of Vermont; next up are two skeins of brown yarn - the one on the right is a skein of Claudia handpainted sockyarn that was a gift from Miriam Felton - on the left is a partial skein of Knitpicks Essential sockyarn in a chocolate-y brown; and at the very top, last but not least is a ball of three-ply alpaca in white/grey/black. I had huge hopes for this, but alas it seems far too thick compared to the chocolate alpaca (which isn't quite laceweight, but is thinner than most sock yarn!)

Checking to see how the brown & pink work together, despite the fact that I am **so not** a pink kind of girl........

Claudia Handpainted above the yarncake of Chocolate Alpaca....

So all of these look.................okay but when you compare it to the original shrug I just don't know if I like any of them well enough. Part of the problem is that this is really a lot to try and visualize - so today I reached the decision that I'm going to have to go ahead and knit what my friend Susan referred to a as a "monstrous colour swatch". I'm going to knit a huge bit of stockingknit - I'm thinking maybe 4"x18" and then along the sides of this swatch I'll pick up with the various colours and will knit the ruffle just like on the real shrug so that I can get a true feel for what it will ultimately look like. At this point I'm planning on knitting a brown ruffle, a pink ruffle, a brown sockyarn ruffle, and a blue maybe-alpaca ruffle. I'd prefer the blue to be darker, so I might dye a test bit first before I knit. But maybe not. First I probably need to skein it so that I can even see if I have enough blue to bother with.

A lot of knitting in preparation, I know, but as I really do just adore this chocolate alpaca and as I've been wanting a kick-ass shrug for quite some time now I really want it to come out nicely - so in the end it probably is all worth it.......

The saddest part of all is that I started both of the cuffs last night thinking that I could knit them at the same time and then Kitchner across the back (to be 100% certain that I didn't run out of yarn!) but now the colour combo that I originally settled on just isn't looking too good to me. But that's probably because I'm impatient and fickle - I figure that knitting a huge gauge/colour swatch will probably calm me down and help me to get some of the ants out of my pants where this pattern is concerned. Plus this way I might - just might - actually get the pattern from Lettuce Knits after I've spent several several several days knitting huge swatches and ruffles!

This is currently what my knitting basket looks like. At the very front is a pair of Snicket Socks. Looooooove that Sundara sockyarn! To the right is more Claudia handpainted. Behind the Claudia handpainted hiding under a yellow tape measure is P's vest waiting for me to knit it's last few crucial inches. To the left of the vest is some leftover bright orange/pink/purple sock yarn that I will be able to *finally* post about once the recipient's package arrives in the mail and they find out the surprise first. And finally, hidden in the lower left corner is some purple bamboo yarn still in raglan form waiting to be frogged.

Hmmmmmmmmm...............now looking at this picture I'm starting to wonder. Should I knit the shrug ruffle in the Sundara sock yarn and the Snicket Socks in the Claudia? I wonder if the Sundara yarn (which is a bit lighter w/ shots of orange & green in it) has a better colour scheme in general to it for this particular project and might work better as the Claudia is currently looking too dark to me.....................?

{sigh. That's me. Fickle.}

Happy Friday the 13th!

I myself have never believed in the whole 'Friday the 13th' malarky - for the majorly huge reason that I myself was born on a Friday the 13th. So you see, for me, it was a very very lucky day.

No real knitting progress to report here - I proctored a friend's exam today for him and was able to get in an hour's progress on the Mystery Stole3 (I'm now up to row 60 with nary a hitch, I'm pleased as punch to say!) and about 45 minutes of work on my Designing Sock project.

All quite boring blog stuff, as a picture of one will just look like a pearly grey scouring pad and the other can't be shown.

Well, I can at least show you a nicely artsy shot of the yarn I'm using - that would at least be a nice bit of colour on an otherwise text-full page!

There is an extremely good chance that I might have already showed you this picture already. If so my apologies - I didn't sleep all too well last night and waking at 5 to hear the sound of rain pitter-pattering down (a simultaneous joy and horror to me - joy because we're long overdue for a nice soaking - which is exactly what we got - and horror because I knew that at least two of my car windows had been left completely wide open) didn't help.

I had a friend over last night to do some knitting with me after the Munch went to sleep, but alas the little guy knew that I was eager for him to zonk out - with the end result being that he finally fell really & truly asleep around 10:30 - my friend having pleaded exhaustion and left a full half hour before that. I felt so bad that once he was finally down I went downstairs and made a batch of cherry vanilla cookies for her, and this morning packaged up a half dozen to bring in to her as a "sorry!" sort of gift. Don't you know they're still sitting on my kitchen counter?

**headdesk**

In the comments from the last post, my Mom (also known as Oma Annie) asked about a child's raglan cardigan pattern - as she has many many little ones to knit for. I gave her some recommendations - one of which being the Baby Surprise Jacket from EZ (I know, not a raglan, but it fit her other knitting requirements!) and suddenly I'm BURNING with the desire to get working on one myself in this otherwise somewhat dry knitting time. I could probably churn one of those babies out in just a week or two using some of the Gedifra yarn that I have a total plethora of - and my Munchkin can always use a new jacket come cooler weather, plus it would really eat a nice hole out of some of my stash yarn, which I'm trying really really REALLY hard to currently work from, having spent enough money lately on MS3 supplies and name tag bits and bobs.....

But as I have neither the Opinionated Knitter nor the Knitter's Almanac (the February Baby Sweater is also something I'd love to knit up!) I've ordered both books via ILL and will have to sit on my hands and wait until the former shows up. So I'm going to start a pair of Snicket Socks out of some amazing Sundara sock yarn

(the yarn is actually much more chocolate and less orange/red than this pic shows)

in the meantime, but as we all know very well that socks don't count I think I might also start a shrug - either the fabulous Drop Stitch Shrug by Meema Spadola in some chocolate

alpaca that I've got or the Twin-Set Shrug by Sharon Shoji in some slate



grey alpaca that I also have - both from the Misty Mountains booth at Maryland Sheep & Wool. I could wind either or both of them up tonight into center-pull balls while Peggers cooks dinner and then I could cast on one or the other during our after-dinner movie entertainment.

Why all the sudden starter-itis? Because I've recently finished so many things and it feels just BIZARRE to be without my normal number of WIP's. I'm a girl who likes her knitting variety, after all, and to be knitting only a mystery stole and to have only a few inches of P's vest left to finish feels like a knitting desert to me - not nearly enough to fully immerse myself in. So now all that's really left is peeking over these two patterns for the rest of the afternoon and making my choice!

{sigh} I've got such a tough life on a balmy Friday afternoon, don't I?????