Wednesday, February 21, 2007

The new cursed yarn

As some of you may recall, I had some yarn a few years back that I decided was just cursed. The first incident involved me, as I was being loaded into an ambulance wearing an immobilizer, screaming "Get my yarn! Get my yarn!! There are 8 of them!" as I saw my new white chunky wool rolling all over the wet and blackened highway. My last run in with this yarn was when I was trying to pull a half knit sweater out of my dogs playful mouth. He was very upset because apparently he had been playing with it for quite some time.
My new cursed yarn is very pretty green OnLine sock yarn that I purchased a while back. I should have known something was amiss after all the other yarn that came in with the order had to sent back because of issues with the evil yarn company. My first personal complication was my yarn breaking in the middle of row. No huge deal. 2nd issue was the dog grabbing the yarn from a chair in the kitchen and wrapping it ALL around the room. The yarn broke again while I was trying to piece the ball back together. About two weeks ago I started knitting the socks again when I decided on my "Knit 3 pairs then buy some STR" rule. The night after I started knitting them, I came home an found the ball in the middle of my foyer. The sock was still up in my office....but I was easily able to locate it by following the long, long train of yarn that had been draped around my home...on multiple stories. I realized shortly after that evening that the sock I was knitting was approximately half the width of all my other socks. My plan to knot them on size 1's to make them extra strong seemed to have backfired. So I frogged them. Maybe a week ago I started knitting them again. I chose to knit them in garter rib, which naturally doesn't show AT ALL on the yarn. That's fine though because it's less work than pretty much any other pattern besides stockinette. I decided to take the socks with me on the road to be my knitting-here-and-there project. This brings me up to today, when I returned from my trip inside Safeway to find my ball of yarn laying in a filthy puddle in the middle of the parking lot. I guess it got caught in my purse strap or something. All I can say is that this yarn isn't going to get out of being knitted! I'm getting my damn STR!
I have to go do my hair now for this evenings events. I have to go to a dinner and lecture my school is hosting. Fun.

Monday, February 19, 2007

New Yarn, New (ish) FO's, and oral surgery

I was informed last night at about 11pm that my mother had rescheduled some dental work that was to be done this coming Thursday and needed me to take her in to the dentist this morning. I ended up having to miss all my classes, which may be good because I have a rather large exam tomorrow that I really need to prepare for. Now though, considering that no one will shut up for long enough for me to read more than 10 words in a row, I decided to take a breather and update.
I've started ordering a lot of yarn from Knitpicks. This ordering yarn over the internet thing may prove very troublesome for my ban account. I don't have photo evidence of my first order but I got this stiff in yesterday or the day before
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This is Palette yarn that I had planned to make Endpaper Mitts out of. My plan was to get two balls each of mint (the light green depicted) and two of bark. When I got my package it contained the mint and 2 balls of wood. I apparently filled in the little quantity box above the color I wanted instead of underneath it. In order to remedy the situation I immediately ordered 2 balls of the proper dark brown and 2 balls of a pretty blue to go with the wood in some future, undetermined fair-isle project.
In order to prove that I do more than just buy more and more and more yarn, here are two FO's from January that haven't been shared yet.
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This is a hat from Stitch n'Bitch Nation for which I can't presently recall the proper name. The yarn is Noro Kureyon....the exact color I'm not really sure of.
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This is me at a very strange angle wearing my rainbow scarf, knit up of 4 balls in various colorways of Kureyon. Why are we sitting around the house wearing various knit objects?? It's cold as a witches "tata" in my house for some reason and these were some quick fixes. It's still mega-cold today but I have yet to resort to wrapping my face up like a little Russian woman. However, the day is still young......

Saturday, February 17, 2007

FO and knitting I just don't feel like doing

I finally finished up my grandpa's birthday socks this past weekend and delivered them to him only two days late. That has to be some sort of record for me. In the past, it's sometimes been literally years before I get my gift projects all finished up. At least for grown-ups. Anyhow, here they are.
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No matter how I took the picture, it kept coming out looking more or the black and white side than in color. I'm curious to see how the colors appear online. Here's my attempt at getting a close up of the pattern...although clearly my attempt was not that great.
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These socks took me a surprisingly long time to knit up. I used a thick alpaca blend (Chunky Al by Elsebeth Lavold) and size 5 needles doing a twin rib pattern. I used to be able to knit a big sock like this up in a day. I'd like to think that these took longer because I was knitting them for a big man's foot, but in reality I think I'm just getting slower. Oh well. They came out well and I think he was quite impressed with them. I rate the project as highly successful.
Now that the socks are done with, I have bigger fish to fry.....or knit. One of my nephews girlfriends is due to give birth in early March. Way, way early March, like the 1st or 2nd. When they were down for my dad's funeral I found out all the details as far as baby sex (that sounds really dirty when I think that sentence in my head, even though it's obvious what I'm referring to) and room colors. I ran right out to get yarn and a new pattern, excitedly digging in once I got back home. I knit away at that thing for quite some time, then left it because, Hey!, I had plenty of time. This was in November. I think once between then and now I've actually picked the thing up, maybe knitting a total of 3 rows on it. Now not only is the pressure on, but I'm finding all the little errors I've made. Not so much errors in knitting, per say, bit errors in knitting judgement. For instance, I decided to cast on for the larger or the given blanket sizes even though I'm using 2 strands of worsted weight held together on 13's rather than a dk or something on a size 8. It's now more that apparent that I could have gotten away with a much, much smaller size. Also, I'm getting peeved at the thought of how long I'm going to have to make this sucker. I think this was one of the main factors in my putting it down to begin with. I kept thinking I had made huge progress but then I'd spread it out and see the true width of it and that made any length gain seem negligible. Not too much I can do about it now. I've knit way too far into it to fuss with ripping anything out. I'll take a picture of it when I get a chance.
In closing, here are the dogs celebrating the fact that it snowed. They were very pleased that I got to stay home and watch them frolic. They also found it really amusing to stand at my porch door and watch me screaming obscenities and throwing things like snow shovels and empty containers of ice melt for hours on end while I slaved to try and get my f*cker car shoveled out of the road. After 3 days of working now, it's still stuck on an ice shelf at the bottom of my driveway and I don't foresee it going anywhere soon.
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Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Beaulina

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My pretty kitty passed away this weekend. I'm very, very sad about that. She was about 17 years old and lived a good life. It seems that old age just got the best of her because she wasn't sick or anything. She just got run down and kind of passed in her sleep at home.
Sorry I've been behind on any knitting content. I have finished some stuff up and I'll share all that later.