Michael's Card!
Received at 8 pm last night. And now it's spent!
9 skeins of Lionbrand wool-ease (8 heather green, one fisherman white)
yarn needles
1 skein microspun purple
1 skein fun fur purple (both for Nina)
And then some batteries for my dad's Kit Kat clock.
Yarn diet?
IT DOESN'T COUNT IF I DON'T PAY FOR IT!
Someone gave me a Michael's gift card for Christmas! Wheee!
Diary of a Knitting Project
4 pm - Chart out intarsia designs
4-6 - search internet for that fingerless glove pattern you've used a hundred times before but never bookmarked
6 pm - cast on and start corrugated rib
9 pm - attempt intarsia designs
10 pm - realize previous attempt was crap, rip and retry
11:34 pm - finish intarsia design successfully, triumphantly try on glove, move hand around and realize corrugated rib is very square and should have been done a needle size smaller.
Decide to post on blogger before ripping and crying.
Happy Holidays!
No matter what your belief system, sit back, eat some candy, and enjoy your paid holidays!
And DON'T FORGET TO KNIT!
HAPPY HOLIDAYS!
Image courtesy of Sphinx 47!
Clearly, I am insane.
The following is a picture of yarn I plan to take with me to California. For two weeks. Oh yes. That's right. Included in there are:
Goddess/God gloves Main Color
Boss scarf
Secret Santa scarf
3 charity caps (two need to be blocked. Again)
Molly's thing (needs a fitting and a collar)
Mom's forsythia shirt (never finished because the sleeves are wonky)
sock yarn
size 3 DPNs
size 4 DPNs
Denise kit
(Not counting the two skeins and needles I have in my travel bag)
The good news is, I have ready made padding for
Mom's cranberry vases.
Careful for that last step... it's a doozy!
I feel off the yarn diet!
Does it count if I buy yarn for Christmas presents?
I went out to AC Moore (So Spiffy! Michaels meets LYS!) to pick up secret santa scarf yarn and boss scarf yarn.
Secret santa is getting something out ot
Patons Divine in "Richest Rose." I still haven't decided on a pattern stitch, and I'm about to ask my knitlist for ideas.
I was going to make it out of LionBrand glitterspun. Except that it was $8 a skein. $8. For 60 yards. I'd have to buy 3 skeins to make a scarf, and there was a $15 limit. So, poop on you, lionbrand!
Boss gave me a very nice (and expensive) present yesterday, completely out of the blue. So, I asked her what colors she would prefer in a scarf (hypothetically). Hypothetically, she said green or purple because it'd go with her hat. So, imagine my happiness at finding
Sugar n Cream Midnight Magic The purples and greens even match her hat and it's dirt cheap. It's not a super pretty shiny yarn, but her hat was crocheted out of hemp and the accents look like acryllic (flat tones). So, the colors are flat. They'll blend better that way. This'll be knit using the
waves pattern.
50% of creating a good knitted gift is finding something that suits the wearer. I'm fairly sure these scarves will be homeruns, but I'm still a little skeptical about Erica's... I never would have picked an outrageous purple eyelash yarn for my aunt, though. I knew she loved purple, but she never struck me as the fuzzy type.
Someone call the SPCA!
Because this is clearly animal abuse!
Fred sez: Maybe if I left her subject me to this indignity, Christina will finally take me for that walk.
It's cell phone magic!
I'm always amazed when I go from
to this:
in about two hours. TWO HOURS!
Thanks to a donation from a kind livejournaler who had the yarn and nothing to do with it, I had some lovely cotton to make this cozy.
The cozy itself is based on
this pattern, though I decreased the stitch count from 40 to 30. The pattern I charted out is supposed to be a caduceus (the symbol of Hermes, the Greek messenger god), but that didn't quite work out the way I wanted it. If I can figure out how to make it work, I'll make a jpeg of the chart.
If I was going to do it over again (and I'm not), I would start the intarsia chart at 6 rows in instead of 10. I tried to center the chart and failed horribly.
More importantly, I would STOP DOING INTARSIA IN THE ROUND and knit this flat and sew the damn seams. As much as I hate them, I think it would look better.
All in all, for two hours, it's not too shabby, though.
Ah, the joys of family...
A while ago, I had an online conversation with my little brother.
He wanted to get me
Harry Potter Scarf for Christmas.
First, I laughed my head off. Then it took me half an hour to explain why.
(Also, check out the knitting humor!)
Ah, knitting projects...
Just when I thought I'd run out of metro projects, another one shows up in the mail!
The problem here is not working on it tonight! I cast on (cuz that's a pain on a bus) and knit a couple rounds, but I have a feeling it will be knit playing receptionist at work tomorrow/Wednesday.
Oh my gods!
Another one of those funny knitting project links:
The knitted Elvis wig
(link via Danny)
One of these days I have to put together the bizarre knit list links page.
Well, of course!
Because I know SO MUCH about fiber arts design, I have come up with a sweater idea that is COMPLETELY IMPRACTICAL to make when I have TWENTY BAJILLION PROJECTS.
And for SOME REASON, I'm using a lot of CAPITALIZATION!
But, if I can actualy get it to work, do it well, and get sizing done correctly, this is something to make and submit to someplace like Vogue Knitting.
But I really don't think I could get it to work.
Dear gods, no!!
I'm going to a movie and I have nothing that i can work on in a movie theater!! Noo!!! How can this be?
Well, if I felt like lugging wheel of yarn and four accent balls down to the theater (a 10-20 minute walk), I still couldn't do intarsia cables in the round in the dark.
The bucket o chics are at picking up stitches and decreases, which makes that preety durned hard to do in the dark.
Believe it or not, that's all I have on the needles. I still need to resew Mom's shirt, because something's seriously wrong with the sleeve caps, but that requires measurement and thought. In the dark.
Hopefully, 'In America' will be so riveting, I won't notice I have NOTHING TO DO WITH MY HANDS FOR TWO HOURS.
Blah blah blah...
I've been mainly working on bucket-o-chics for charity and making LJ icons and the like.
I've renamed "Braided Cables" "Jack & The Beanstalk," which will inevitably be shortened to just Jack.
As I'm considering submitting it for knitty, I'm going to do my darnedest to keep mum about it.
As for the coonskin cap issues with knitty- I just don't want to talk about it. At ALL.
Huzzah!
The first hat a thon hats have showed up! There was even a manly gray hat!
Go you!
(Unfortunately, I forgot to ask the hat receiver for names and locations, so I don't know if it was yours or not)
Edit: Ack! I don't know why it posted three times! Blogger was being bad last night, I didn't know! Ack! I fixed it, though.
I'm off to knit! But first, I think I need to make an offensive knitting icon for
lj.
Take a look.
(Clip art from A Perfect World and knitting.about.com)
And for those wanting to design their own cable patterns,
check this out. I promise, it is the bomb diggity.
Knit knit knit...
Ah,
the new knitty.
All very pretty, but absolutely nothing that I could see myself making. Ah, well.
Yay!
First, I've FINALLY cast on for my Braided Cables sweater.
Second, despite a whole bunch of stupid people and
drama, nice people do exist.
I got a nice note from
I-Candi today, and while she was probably fishing for a link back (which you now have!), it was still a very nice note that made me smile.
And then after asking a knit swap for yarn scraps for a
cell phone cozy, not only is someone sending them to me, they're refusing a swap back! So, I'm getting free yarn! FREE YARN! And this doesn't break the yarn diet because I'm not buying it!
(OK, yeah it does, but I actually do need a cell phone cozy)
Anyway, I'm going to knit and watch
Roman Holiday now. Happy Friday, kids!
Knitter's Block (or I'm a Blockhead)
Pick whichever title you find the most annoyingly cute.
First, a finished object!
This hat is based on my friend Kati's cat
Ridgeway (who I renamed Oprah for some reason). Everyone say 'aaaaaaaaaaaaaw!' Anyway, I made her a basic
Kittyville hat with my standard variations (selvage stitch on the ear flaps and 2nd color triangles). She loved it and asked for another, to look like the kitty.
This was a challenge. Intarsia in the round. It CAN be done. It's just a pain in the ass. And I'll be doing it a whole lot for my braided cables sweater. Which I will start any day now. Really. BUT, this gave me an idea of how to do it, and now that I've worked through the foibles, I have confidence that I can do the intarsia cables, well, perhaps not with a smile and a laugh, but I can do them.
It is a cute hat.
My stitch count was off with the white, which is why one side of the band is larger than the other. Also, I made the seed stitch band 1/2" shorter than the pattern because I realized how freakishly huge and un-triangle like that shape would become. But then, I'm not getting paid for this, like I originally thought I was, so it evens out.
NOW, onto the blocking.
I have to admit it. I have knitter's block. I hate blocking, I hate sewing, seaming, and all of those other finishing things. I love the finished object, I hate the finishing. Basically, I turn into Fred.
Life is too tiring. Can you do it for me? Please? I am so cute and I have such big eyes?
So, imagine my surprise when I found this:
Confused? Maybe this will help...
Yes, I blocked the Bucket-O-Chics. (And started a third, but that's another story)
And then I blocked Erica's Scarf.
Woot! It's pretty and soft and close to too short, but oh well. Also, I'm much happier with the k1p1 rib. Compare and contrast:
I've been seaming up Mom's forsythia shirt, but the sleeves seem to be too long and one is much longer than the other. So, I'm confused there.
So, there you go. Gratuitous dog pictures, 3 finished objects, and lots of fun. What more could you want? What's that? A knitted version of genitalia?
Sure! Here you go!
Happy knitting, kiddos.
Oh, by the way.
Laundry = done
Blocking = not done
I guess I owe the internet a quarter.
OK, so...
I have decided that since enetation.co.uk has the most unreliable commenting system ever, it's time to switch to Haloscan. I thought I'd timed it perfectly with the beginning of the month to not mess up prior comments but it seems that I was wrong.
So, more reliable commenting, lost comments. It sort of evens out.
Does it help if I say I'm sorry and that my if-else statement doesn't seem to work?
