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.

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!)

;>