Goldielocks...

Alright so I'm a redhead rather than a blonde, and its knitting needles rather than porridge. [1] Work with me here on the comparison.
I've got size 30 cotton and a doily pattern that's caught my eye. (Yes more size 30 cotton. Sue me, it's my favourite lace thread.) 2 mm needles arent giving me the love anymore. The plain section is too dense for my liking.. perhaps I'm just uptight (Yeah yeah yeah.. I've heard it), or perhaps I should switch to decaf (Uhh.. full time tech support. As the button I got at GenCon says: I drink coffee for your protection. Not going to happen.), but I think my gauge has gotten tighter. Well. Damn. Okay, no problem.. I've got some 3 mm needles in my bag. (No project they go with, just a zippy bag of needles. Yeah, my life is like that.) 3 mm is way too big. The thread has no structure, no stitch definition. 2 mm is too small, 3 mm is too big.. where's my just right! 2.5 mm you say? Do I dare take those needles out of the sock in progress?



Yep, that's the sock in process no longer on 2.5 mm needles, but now on 3.0 mm needles. I really don't think one round of funky gauge in the ribbing is going to be the end of my socks' world as we know it. And I get the startitis under control. Uhh.. no I give in to it. As I always do. I am weak. *hangs head* See?



Salient points for the detail oriented: J&P Coats size 30 mercerized cotton, size 2.5 mm bamboo needles, one of the patterns out of Gloria Penning's compilation of Rachel Schenlling's patterns. Pattern 5 on page 3 for anyone who has the book.


[1] No porridge, but I do have a bear:



I'd claim it's blurred for the privacy of whoever that is sitting in front of the bear, but no.. really it's a photo out of a moving vehicle pre-coffee. The bear sits in front of the gallery next to where I work on campus. It is regularly dressed up for events or at the whim of university students.

Baked and half baked.

Nothing like mixing and matching my geeky pursuits. Sitting around at office hours for the vampire larp at UoW, bump into a D&D player that we game with in Toronto and work on casting off the doily. I think that moment perhaps quantified all that is geeky in my world. This damnned doily has given me no end of grief on the thread front. First the knots, then the running out, then the non mercerized. Grrrrr. It is done. Done done. Not blocked, but done.




I also finished the first of the dayglo socks. Jaywalker pattern, Regia sock yarn. These are the travel socks, so they dont happen quickly. I've cast on for the second one already, so hopefully that will keep SSS at bay. The fit's pretty good, and while I haven't weighed the ball of yarn remaining, I'm easily going to get the pair out of it and probably could get a pair of kids socks as well. Yay small feet. (Something about me is actually small. Hands and feet.. hey, I'm taking what I get here.)




Now I just need to decide what next. Perhaps I'll surf my Ravelry queue and see what leaps at me. I'm slowly getting the hang of Ravelry (a networking site for crafts.. sort of. It's a great big gawk fest at what everyone else is doing really). I wasnt sure of it to start with, but I'm a slowpoke at everything. Focus is for oth.. oooh! Shiny!

Poor old camera.

My poor old camera doesn't cope with shiny well. It doesn't cope with little well either. Have mercy on it, it's (in the scheme of digital) ancient. (which means a few years old. I'm so glad humans arent ranked on that scale of ancient). Anyhow, that being said, here's some beaded shiny (little *and* shiny.. oh yay) that I did in class last night.


Class was with the Guelph Needlecraft Guild (comment if you want more info), and it was downright heavenly to sit down at a class where I wasn't one of the people who knew what was going on. I tend to take classes that I could be teaching and end up being a resource for other students, but beading.. I'm a mook like everyone else. Here's a closer picture.. isnt it pretty!




If all goes well this evening, I might even have a knitting FO soon. Wouldn't *that* be novel.

Argh! Pink!

Problem. My usual. Using vintage thread, run out before the end of the doily. We won't get into the 'you never blog' problem, let's just pretend it never happened and move on. Okay? Okay. Right! Out of thread. As usual. This time about 9 rows from the end, which is at once better and worse than 2 rounds from the end. Varigated pink in size 30. No problem. I've got pink coming out my ears (me? Pink? Why!? I've no idea, I think it breeds). Seven different balls of pink cotton come out to the back deck with me. Natural light is the only way to go for matching.

Every last one.. mercerized. Nice and crisp and shiny. Doily? Not mercerized. Soft and faintly fuzzy and definately not shiny. Well. Damn!

Vintage cotton is nearly always mercerized. I'm up a tree here.. but wait! I did a little tiny doily out of this very same cotton thinking 'I've got lots! No problem!'.. I'll go find it, rip it out (Eeep!) and have plenty more cotton.

I can't find it. It's in the house somewhere, but damnned if I know where. In the hunt, I pick up a ball of white and put it down. And pick it up again. Size 30.. not mercerized. Well I'll be hotdamnned! Whoo!

Varigated middle, white edge.. nearly becoming my trademark.

Why do I have this much pink!?

Ding! Ding! Round 2.

By some miracle, I've ended up in Round 2 of the Knit Off, and the pattern comes out Sat am. In a moment of sheer bad luck, I'm paired off against the fastest knitter from round one bar none. Hopefully Paula just kicks my tush, rather than trashes me so soundly it's embarassing. If the gods of fate are shining, perhaps she'll.. uhh.. sleep through the pattern release and it'll be lace and.. yeah. It's an honour to be in the top 16. Really.

Knitting my face off will be a nice change in stress from my Gryphcon stress. It's about this time every year that I swear up and down and left and right that I will never do this again. Ever. It might even stick this year.

I have, however, been knitting. The flare up in my elbow has eased to a dull roar (just in time to see the specialist.. aint that always the way), so I've got a pair of mini doilies unblocked and a sock at the heel. We're going picture lite today so close your eyes. Picture a blob of pink crochet cotton. That's one doily. Now picture a blob of yellow cotton. That's the other doily. Remember the sock from here? Well picture the second one down at the heel. See? It's good to exercise your imagination and not rely on photos all the time!

So that's where the colour went!

I'm giving knitting another try.. shhhh, don't tell the elbow that it's supposed to be upset by this. I am, however, also trying to mix it up and do other things. Including digging out the dyepot and cotton. Prompted, I must admit, by a momentary panic as I remembered I'm teaching at the Needlecraft Guild a week today. Clearly this requires not class prep, but a dye weekend. Clearly.

I'm teaching a lace doily class. Doily = cotton. Therefore dyeing cotton is class prep. Right? Right!? How about taking seriously ugly cotton

and some el cheapo cold water dye from the fabric store in blue and my trusty dye crock pot (turned off, we're talking cold water dye here). Voila.

I am more pleased with this than I really have any right to be. I mean I took fugly cotton and dunked, but hot damn it turned out well! I also *cough* over estimated how much dye one ball of cotton would need. The dyepot didn't even vaguely change shade. I couldn't leave it like that! Poor lonely dye. Sooooo...

became...

The big ball of white stuff is acrylic (I'm pretty sure) and I only balled off a wee sample that stained a little. The bizarre varigated on the bottom right came from a ball of ecru cotton still balled up tightly and thrown in for good measure. I decided not to skein off the ball of pink cotton, my arms were getting sore by then.

Sore arms, and still a deep blue dye bath. I was out of cotton things I wanted blue. I mean I like blue and all, but there is only so much blue cotton a girl needs. Especially a girl who is not currently knitting (much). So in a moment of 'enh, what the hell', I dumped a healthy glug glug glug of vinegar in it, had a moment of 'I am so smrt'(1) with the ph measurement and tossed fleece in. Heated it up (wool likes being warm. And acidic.), let it cool and...

Well I'll be damnned. Apparently I did get it acidic. Now I just need to develop a fondness for all things blue.

(1) pH testing by it by strip or by drops of indicator into a water sample relies on colour to determine the pH. My dyepot already had the dye in it. It was a lovely deep blue. This makes it hard to determine the lovely pale shade of colour that tells you the pH. I am so smrt!

Where did all the colour go?

I woke up this morning to a white paw in my face (alright, that's not so unusual), and once I got reaquainted with my glasses and got Dalla off my chest I looked out the window to this.

The entire outside world had become white all of a sudden. Whammo. Very pretty, even if the drive in was sloshy and slippy and miserable. Definately a boot day, not a croc day. (Note to all: Crocs + slush = Very Cold Feet. Take my word on it, even the most fantastic hand knitted wool socks will not help keep your feet warm in near freezing slush. I've tested this theory empirically.)

Fortunately waiting on the kitchen floor for me was an exhausted dye pot. (Alright, so I felt pretty exhausted too, but that had less to do with the lack of colour and more to do with needing an adjustment on the vader mask. Which I suppose is a whole different lack of colour in the all black look.) A couple nights back I decided I needed more orange in my world. Everyone needs more orange, it's a law or something. So I balled up a chunk of reclaimed wool. (New ballwinder, still makes me squee. It's downright fun.) Plunk in dye crock pot. Add a glug of vinegar and 2 packets of orange kool aid. And half a packet of colourless. It was handy, it was more citric acid. Fake watermellon kiwi smell + fake orange smell + vinegar is not something I think Kraft was aiming for as a marketing technique. Just saying. I let it cool in the pot and *cough* left it another day to um.. cool. Fully exhaust. Something. This morning I came downstairs to this little bloom of colour.

I'll be interested to see how far into the cake of yarn the dye went. I may be redyeing the interior bit to have some colour to it. It'll be something for post dental hell tonight. (Only one of the weeny layers of hell, just a check up and annual lecture about flossing. I still hate hate hate HATE going. Childhood trauma. *shudder*)

Plan B

One might argue that 26 hrs of being in a car (over the course of two different days spaced 4 days apart) with only the scenery and one's knitting is an image of heaven. It slips into a layer of hell when you realize that you cannot knit for any length of time without pain and that many hours in the back seat causes the knees to compete with the elbow for one's attention. So. Plan B.

 

I can, apparently, still spindle spin. I did a little bit of wheel spinning a few weeks back when the elbow first started acting up, but I find my Ashford Traveller, while compact, a little bulky to fit in the back seat of the car along with 3 gamers worth of crap. Fortunately, my toy wheel spindle travels well. I started these singles driving down to GenCon a few years back, and it seems to tag along with me for back seat craft potential when I've had enough of (or can't) knit. The fleece is from a dye exchange equally a few years back now, and spins up to be this really neat mottled yarn. I'm spinning fairly thin, and I'm thinking I'm going to najavo ply to try and keep the colours vaguely together, although the colourways are so short, I'm not sure it will matter much, and if I only two ply it, I'll have more yardage. Decisions, decisions. So the hoodie might be on hold for a little while (probably a good thing as my elation at being 'nearly done' was shattered by reading along in the pattern 'continue pattern as set for 14 inches'.. 14 inches.. aieee! So much for nearly done!), and the fleece stash might see the light of day for a change. I wonder if embroidery bothers the arm.. sewing.. bobbin lace?

Oh the choices...

Mariah is coming along nicely, arm pain nothwithstanding. No marathon sessions anymore, just little bits and pieces here and there. Fortunately, little bits and pieces add up. I'm on the hood, which is fewer than the 400 million stitches that the body was, and with luck, I should have an FO in the next few days.

I did learn, in a fit of grumpy last night (y'know those days where you could be handed a box of zero calorie chocolate truffles with a winning lotto ticket inside and somehow your brain could make that a bad thing too? Yeah. Grumpy.), that spinning hurts in all different ways. Apparently that was good enough (Change is as good as a rest? Perhaps not.) for me to dig out my wheel again and go back to working on the never ending spinning project. I expect it might end sooner if I worked on it more than say an hour every six months or so. (If any spinners are reading, mystery wool roving, slightly felted (hey, it was free!), ashford DT traveller, scotch tension.)

Yes, I know, it's a damn good thing I knit better than I take photos. I blame the camera, it hates close ups. My camera is claustrophobic. That's clearly it. At least on my monitor, the colour of the yarn is pretty close to accurate. I'm plying it up as two ply, to call it consistent would be generous and I have no clue what I'm going to do with it at the end of it all. I did a little bit of spinning on a drop spindle this morning, that too hurts in different ways but it's a good hurt (?). The whole 'these muscles have forgotten that they move this way' hurt. Depending on how long it takes the arm to heal, I may get more spinning then knitting done for the next little while. Of course, getting near the end of Mariah has me dreaming of what project comes next. Will I be a good kid and dig up a UFO? I can think of two shawls that fall into that category, or will I cast on something new? Something from stash? Lace? Another garment? More socks? Toys? Baby stuff? (Don't look at me like that, no I'm not spawning, just everyone else I know is.) Oh the choices!

Cable needle, we don't need no stinking cable needle!

I'll preface this with the commentary that my very first knitting project (beyond acres of garter stitch and a little stuffed penguin) was a cabled sweater. The friend who taught me how to knit operated on the principle that if you really want to do something, you'll learn how on the way. So I picked out a cabled hooded cardigan and she helped me buy needles and yarn and a cable needle never once giving a hint that this was supposed to be Difficult. That sweater never got finished.. by the time I'd upsized it enough to fit me, the drop shoulder design was absurd and I detested it and ripped it all out. I still have the yarn. I did, however, learn not to fear anything in knitting in the process of that sweater. Cables? Sure! Lace? No problem. It's all one stitch at a time, if you follow the directions logically it all works. So I've been doing cables since day one, and somewhere along the way I read a passing comment about cabling without a cable needle. There was no description of the technique, just an off handed comment. So I thought about it a moment and went with how I thought they meant. Exactly as it says, no needle. Turns out that they mean some odd twisting of the stitches and putting them all back on the left hand needle in the new order before you knit it. I think. I still don't have that method down pat. I do, however, like to live on the edge apparently and I just don't use anything but fingers. This works better with smaller twists, 1 or two stitches being moved. You can hold three or more, but it gets messy. Oh yes, and pardon the pretty awful photos, me and the 'I don't do close ups' camera on delay and a 100 cd spindle case did our best.

Here we are, arriving at a spot where we need to cable. Eek! It's a two over two cable, nothing too scary.

The two stitches at the start of the needle need to come to the front and look! There they are, dangling in the breeze. (They're the fuzzy green things in the middle. Trust me.)

Alright, squint with me and pretend that the horrible focus is normal. I hold onto the stitches with the tips of my fingers. Really, with a thumb nail and the pad of my finger, the fingernail holds them better, but wool is sticky enough that they don't really want to travel. This next photo is of a different stitch, one stitch held in back rather than two in front, but is (miracle!) slightly clearer.

It does take a bit of dexterity to knit while holding stitches, but a smidge of practice and it's not so bad. And it's only for a stitch or two.

Stick those (fuzzy again.. dammit!) held stitches back on the left hand needle and away you go. Not a cable needle in sight, and after the first few, it barely throws a pause in the stride of my knitting. Perhaps not the best plan for very slippery yarn, but then you just need to be more careful to hold onto them tightly. I tend to do most of my cable work in wool or acrylic, both hold their stitches pretty well. Only three more pattern rows to the end of the sleeve cable! Whoo! The end is in sight, and I need to fiddle for some changes I made earlier. Drat.

Withdrawl

Well I'm still not really knitting. I think I've managed about 1 sweater row and 1 sock round in about ten days. Slowly, very slowly, the arm is responding to the happy shiny anti-inflamatories, and while I haven't been specifically prohibited from knitting, the common sense of 'Gosh, it hurts when I do this' apparently still functions in my head. I might work in tech support, but I really do have some lingering aversion to pain.

So, what's a girl to do when she can't (or really shouldn't) be knitting? Stash re-org. Or more accurately stash dig through and pet and *gasp* even a little bit of inventory. A few conclusions were drawn after half a lazy Sunday spent poking amongst bins of yarn.

• I really do not own nearly as much yarn as I think I do. Sure, it's contained in about 4 rubbermaid totes, which seems like a lot I know, except that I keep up on the knitting list. My stash is but a drip.


• Nearly all of my stash are one ball of this, two balls of that, half a ball of this other. Scraps and bits. Enough to do a project larger than mittens is a rarity at best, and I'm not size XS.


• For someone who loves colour as much as I do, my stash is mostly really boring colours. And a hellish amount of green. Wow oh wow do I love my green when shopping. While I can appreciate that a nice foresty green looks good on someone with my colouring, this is a little excessive.


• I own enough crochet cotton (size 10 and smaller) to knit a doily the size of Ontario. Oh. My. Goodness. I have got to start looking into ways to knit the size 10 and larger into something other than lace doilies. I prefer those in size 30 and smaller thread. Which I also have copious amounts of. If I ever buy more cotton, smack me.


• I have both less sock yarn and less lace weight wool than I thought. I was sure I had plenty of sock yarn tucked away, but apparently it's all in little bits and pieces.

So while I considered participating in the various Knit from one's stash endeavours running around the net, in retrospect, I expect I'd just be annoyed. I'm not quite at the must buy to start a new project stage, but I'm not so far off as I thought I might be.

Next time I hit the cataloging bug, fabric stash. Or pattern stash. Or embroidery stash. Or or or...

Pretty colours!

Apologies for the pause in posting, I finally did something obnoxious to my elbow (aching is normal, sharp pain is not) and it has ground knitting to a halt. Actually it's ground a good many things to a halt, including work while I spent the afternoon yesterday in various waiting rooms (Dr office, lab for blood work, x ray place, pharmacy, bus rides to and fro.. blah.). Without my knitting. Women's magazines (by and large) are really insipid and I should get more games for my palm. While there was no specific prohibition against knitting, everything hurts which makes the attention span even shorter than usual. So, in lieu of awesome sweater photos, I went digging in the photo stash for something else. (I have no illusions that anyone's here for the writing.) *grin*

Back in November, I was off work a day and got the idea to try using up some Crystal Lite drink mix for dyeing. I wasn't entirely sure how the fake sugar would affect things, and as I won't drink the stuff and my husband's moved on to different fake flavours in his beverages, I figured on using the the last of it in the dye pot. This is, for the record, that single serve in a water bottle sized packets. I use a crockpot for nearly all my dye work. I really /like/ being able to walk away and know it's at a constant temperature, and it equally helps me keep my dye pot separate from food pots. My only wish.. that it was bigger. It's a 4 litre (quart?) pot, and doesn't hold nearly enough for anything but healthy sized samples. Fortunately, I tend not to be aiming to dye enough for big projects and am very fond of colourways rather than uniform colour. Alright, so a couple packets (This was 3 months ago, I don't remember specifics) of Raspberry Ice into the pot, a dollop of vinegar and (purposefully) balled up reclaimed yarn.

I left the yarn in balls specifically to get different depths of shade from the dye penetrating the ball of yarn. I did mention that I'm not much for uniform colour, right? The absolute worst part of this experience is skeining wet wool on my pvc niddy noddy such that it actually can be properly rinsed and dry all the way through. Ew ew ew yuck yuck. The next batch was uhh.. tangerine? Some orange flavour, and therefore, orange colour. This one, for whatever reason, did not want to penetrate the ball of yarn. Just would /not/. Three times I dug it out, skeined some off onto the niddy noddy and plunked the rest of the ball back into the dyepot. As I recall, I dumped some wiltons in to get vaguely the same colour as I just did not have enough packets of drink mix to get it all dyed to any sort of colour.

Yes, I know, even food safe dye should be careful with other clutter on the counter. I live on the edge. Welcome to the clutter of my kitchen, it matches nicely the clutter everywhere else in my life too.

After far too long skeining wet wool (ew ew ew), these are three of the final skeins drip drying away on a dining room chair covered with tea towels (and with a tea towel on the floor. I should have covered the entire floor, skeining wet wool seems to send water everywhere, whodathunkit).

Someday I'll even decide what to do with the skeins. Perfect for felting, I'm quite sure. Oh.. and as always, I toss a handful of fleece into the dyepot at the end to pick up the last of the colour, I've something against tossing a not completely spent dyepot.

Green green green

It has long been a running joke at the Needlecraft Guild (alas, useful websiteless), that everything I do is green. It's not (entirely) true, I mean I do tend to work in green an awful lot, but I really do use other colours! At the moment, however, my world is a sea of green. Green motherboards and computer components that need replacing at work, a sad little green plant...

If anyone happens to know what this poor little thing is, exactly, I'd be grateful. It's but a pale shadow of it's former perky upright self. I don't think it much liked sitting next to the very cold and drafty window once winter hit.

The most green, however, comes from the sweater. I promised pictures, here's pictures. Look at the sweater, do not look at the messy messy desk under the sweater. Messy desk is a sign of creative productivity, I'm sure of it. I heard it on the radio.

It really is starting to look like a sweater. If it's a sweater that will fit me, that's a whole different kettle of fish, but I have hopes. I should sew up the sides and try it on, but I'm chicken to know the awful truth. Even if it doesn't fit me now, surely it will eventually, right? Here's a bit of cable porn for the sleeve junkies.

Hrm, that might get some really unexpected hits and surprised people. Hee hee.

Tweak? Design?

One of my email lists recently asked 'Are you a designer? Do you ever want to be a designer?' as their Question of the Week and I had to ask.. So what /is/ design? Where does tweaking end and designing begin?

It is a good question, and one that comes up often on the knitting lists. Especially in the context of how many changes do you need to make on a basic sweater to call it your own and be able to claim intellectual property of it. There really are some basics that don't change from one piece to another.. is changing the colour a design choice? The yarn? The gauge? The fit? Adding short rows? A little pattern instead of knitting it plain? Enough of these changes and you'd never think it was the same sweater or shawl, but how many is enough?

I don't know the answer. I don't think of myself as a designer, but I equally don't feel obligated to knit a pattern as written. I take it, I make it my own. I've often wondered how this is different from say.. a pianist who plays Mozart. They take someone else's music and puts their own mark upon it and it becomes their own. They are an artist.. by common words.. But that's a whole different rant. *grin*

I did, however, spend the weekend playing D&D and knitting. And knitting and playing D&D. My paladin is level 4 and I'm down to 290 stitches in a row. I need to get to 218 (ish.. see comments about tweaking). 9 more decrease rows. Wow. That's a reasonable number! We will see if it's long enough at that point, there may be a couple more rows tucked in. No picture today, too tired to fight with it to get a good one, and I stopped mid row. I will try and have one for tomorrow, I promise!

Poor broken body..

Have mercy on my poor broken body.. it's a (mis)quote from (in my mind at least) the Muppet Christmas Carol by Rizzo the Rat, as all the good quotes are really. Today, the quote comes to mind because of this.

Look closely.. see how the needle tips are twisted the wrong way from each other? I grant you, they've been doing that for years, but finally, the little connector from needle to cable is starting to break. *Sigh* Broken enough to catch every other stitch. I finally surrendered and knit the green sweater of doom onto a different 4.5 mm needle, but it's not an Aero. Yes, I'm an Aero snob. I like my knitting needles to have points that can be used as the weapons that all the paranoid people on planes think they are. (If any of them think I'm going to get blood all over my knitting by stabbing them, they really just don't know knitters.) This needle has been with me nearly since the beginning of my knitting career.. it's been the default 'I have aran/worsted/kitchen cotton, lets swatch with 4.5 and see'. It's like a favourite pair of jeans, just when you've gotten them broken in nicely, fitted to one's curves.. it means they're on the edge of death.

So goodbye my favourite knitting needle. It's a good thing Len's is open late tonight.

Paper clips and ball point pen caps...

A conversation about cables this morning devolved into a litany of what sorts of things I've used in lieu of cable needles over the years. Everything from the cap to a ballpoint pen, dpns, earrings (the dangly fish hook ones, not the little stud earrings), pencils, nothing at all and my miscellaneous tool of choice.. paper clips. *Wistful sigh* Paper clips. So may uses, knitterly and in my other life as a techie. I mean they move seamlessly from Disk Extraction Tool to stitch holder to stitch marker to cable needle to marking a place on the pattern sheet to.. well I think that's enough for the poor little paperclip, isn't it? A knitting tool I am never without in my little box of goodies.

For the record, the little box is about 10 cm (4 inches) long. Measuring tape, paper clips, stitch markers, tooth picks (also excellent cable needles), wool needles, tapestry needles, emery board (for both my nails when catching on wool and my wooden and bamboo needles), and as always a little bit of yarn.. just in case. So what do you keep in your knitting bag with useful bits in it?

Neverending green...

Happy National (alright so not my nation, but I'm willing to co-opt) Pie day. This is a holiday I can get behind, even if thanks to my currently aim to have less of me ultimately, I don't think I will be celebrating by baking a pie. Have some pie on my behalf!

Anyhow, yes. Neverending green. I came to the realization today that my two never ending projects are both green. There is the sweater of doom.



See that little bit of connected knitting under the stitch marker? That's where it went from pieces to rows of doooooom. 402 stitches currently, should be 394 by the end of lunch hour. *yawn* I am eternally grateful for the continued cable up the sleeve or this project would be yet another UFO.

The other green project that is stalled is the fir cone shawl that I'm doing in green laceweight. It is quite so stalled that I don't even have photos of it. A triangular shawl that is at the long rows and memorized pattern stage. *yawn* I really don't have the attention span for this. Green green green. Green green green. It's not easy being green you know.

434, 426, 428...

I suppose I should be grateful that unlike most of my work, the numbers are going down rather than up. Raglan shaping takes 8 stitches out on every frontside row and unlike my usual from the centre out lace, every other row is just a few less to work. I have no photos today, the sweater looks very much like the last photos of it. A big heavy blog of blue-green wool. Unless it's green-blue wool. I never really have worked out what the difference is between the two. I think it is the never ending rows of sweater than has caused me to lose my mind.

Knit off 2007. Because somehow in getting slaughtered mercilessly in Sock Wars, I've decided that I should be a competative knitter. I knit slowly and I'm easily frustrated with the attention span of a ferret on pixie stix. This should be amusingly brief.

Month late and a dollar short...

Or something like that. I do hate this time of year, there is something about Jan/Feb that is instant blah for me. Which means a lot of sitting around staring blankly and not doing anything. I have, however, momentarily shaken off the blah and dug out some photos of things I've been working on when I dredge up the attention span to do anything.

Finally I am making progress on Mariah. I've finished the bits in pieces and am now doing the join it all together on one big circular to do the shoulders and yoke. It has gotten unwieldy and distinctly not photogenic. See?




I'll provide a little sleeve cable porn just to appease folks that there really is more to the sweater than greenyblue blob of yarn. Isn't this just lovely? If I do say so myself?




Nothing like keeping track of sleeve shaping and cable patterns with distinct repeats that aren't all the same all that same time. I did most of the sleeves in Scotland at my grandmother in law's dining room table with papers spread out everywhere to keep notes. I expect every time I look at the sleeves I'll remember the quiet, the smell of the coal fire and have a wee bit of Scotland along with me.

When I haven't been working on the sweater, I've (of course) got a sock on the go. This sock yarn is to die for. Apple Laine fingering weight yarn, 50% merino, 20% silk, 20% kid mohair and 10% nylon. Yum. Yum. Yum. The silk and mohair takes the dye and makes the colours just glow. Honestly, I think I knit this just to pet the yarn. I'm knitting Apple Harvest sock pattern with the Sea Breeze colourway. Even better, the yarn company is based just outside of Ottawa, where I grew up. It might not be local to me anymore, but it still feels local. I've only just started the second sock. I should (thank you having little feet) have enough for a second pair of ankle socks. Maybe. Pretty darn close at least.