Shhhhhhhhh.......

I've been poking around on the Internet for quite some time and it seems to be the trend for Fridays to be yarn porn day. This couldn't be more fitting considering that today is perhaps the most yarn-pornyest day that ever there was. I have to kind of keep it on the down low though. I think I may have reached a new peak in the "Oh my GOD! What have I done?!?" category. Anyhow, let's get this party started.....
First off is aforementioned Lorna's Laces Shepherd sock.

Here's a bit of a closeup that shows the colors a little better.

I don't really remember what all I d about this yarn before, but the green one is Envy and the other is Vera. Yum, yum, yum. Even if it is way thinner than I had in mind when I ordered it. I still couldn't really capture all the coolness of the Vera. It's a very strange yet pretty combo of dark pink/mauve/fuchsia with some browns and grayish greens. The Envy is the one I'm attempting to knit up for my sister, though I think I'm going to have to frog it once again because now the sock is turning out super huge. Did I mention this before?? Possibly.....

Okay. Now here is what caused me to think that maybe I've really lost it this time. This is like the Adult Film Awards of my yarn porn.

Voila!

And in a view that makes me froth at the mouth just a wee bit more....

From left to right we have Pink Granite, Socktopus, Rhodonite, Lunasea (which is particularly applicable to me), Puck's Mischief, and Fire on the Mountain. All of it is STR mediumweight, with the exceptions of Socktopus and the Pink Granite which are lightweight.

Socktopus and Lunasea are two of the new colors from the Tides collection. I literally almost threw up from excitement when I saw that they had added them.

Fire on the Mountain is just like a hippie tie-dye rainbow for the feet. I'll be looking forward to digging into this one. It'll take me some time to think of something to do that won't f#%@# around with the color scheme. I got these two patterns, also.

I like the patterns from BMFA. I still am uneasy about mixing lace with colors, but apparently sometimes it works out just fine. So, what does one do when all these goodies happen to arrive on the same day?? Absolutely freak out. Now, I've hid yarn before for various reasons. I wouldn't want a kid to touch something or I wouldn't want someone to see something that may be for them. There have also been times where I was little ashamed that I had to pick up this or that while I as out so I may have just pretended that it didn't happen for awhile while the yarn rested in a hidden bag. This however........

You have to remember that the above happened in like a nanosecond while I thought someone was coming up the stairs. Yes, this yarn was hidden out of pure fear. Fear o what, I'm not exactly sure, but fear it was. It as like having a soft, squishy, super wash merino panic attack and moment of sheer joy simultaneously. Scary. I think I'm going to have to take them out one by one and just pretend the others don't exist. Then, once one is safely hidden, I'm come down and nab another one. Sickness, people. That's what this is. Plain old crazy-yarn-lady sickness.

Hope everyone has a good weekend !!

laziness

my keyboard is broken in a way which prevents me from capitalizing letters. sorry for that. I'm feeling very lazy/tired today and really didn't feel like uploading pictures. if i had done so, i would be showing you a completed quill lace sock along with about half of a second. I'd also perhaps show off some of the new Lorna's laces i got to make my sister and myself some goodies. I'm a little peeved about the Lorna's laces though because i realized, only after splurging on quite a few different colorways, that i was ordering the sock weight and not the sport. the sock weight is okay and feels about as good as any other sock yarn, but the sport weight is soft, cushy, and all around my preferred Lorna's laces sock type product. i started my sisters socks on a size one and worked and worked my little hands off. after about a night's worth of work.....which yielded an approximate total length of about 2-2.5 inches, i found that it there was absolutely no way in hell that any full size human was going to fit it over their foot/heel. i ripped it out and started a new pattern with 80 stitches and am now thinking, after knitting and knitting and knitting, that it may be far too large an fiber consuming. this is one of the main reasons why i am a very selfish knitter/person in general. things just don't turn out right when i try my hand at random kindness.
okay, I've grown tired of playing with this monstrous key board so I'll bid a quick farewell and come back when i have some visuals.

Quill Lace Socks

I decided not to waste any time before diving into another sock. Surprise, surprise. My latest endeavor is the quill lace socks from the current (??) issue of Knitty. I'm liking the pattern now, but found it a little tedious at first. I'm often that way when I first start something new. Now that I have it in my head and can just do it, the sock and I are getting along better. Oh, and this is my Little Bunny Foo Foo medium weight STR. See the resemblance to Lucy??

Here's a detail of the lace.

I made some sort of heinous mistake on the cuff and ended up with surplus of stitches. I did my best to fix it but knew as I was doing it that it wasn't exactly working out. I should have been less lazy and ripped back a few rows, but I don' really care too much. You can see a pretty obvious screw up here in the middle two columns.

It's in the back of the sock and it's not like a person could tell (I hope) without really looking. The sock also has an 'Eye of Partridge' heel, which I don't think I've even done before. It's not all that different stitch wise from my usual slip stitch heel, but there's quite a contrast in appearance.

I've gotta play around with my camera some more and figure out how to get shots that have more color accuracy. I keep getting wither really dark photos or the flash bleaches everything out so much that my pictures look either black & white or like a giant shiny thing. I'll have to put that on my to-do list. That's all for now : )

Goes From Virgin to Yarn Whore in 60 Seconds

I've come to a realization about myself. I need to anticipation of packages arriving in the mail to get through the average day. I knew bad things would happen when I started shopping online. I knew it! Oh well. I guess having yarn issues,while still a legitimate worry, is much less severe than many problems one might develop. That being said, here is what arrived for me this week.

I hate to say it but I'm less impressed with this shipment than i was with the previous one. I think it's practically because the colors are a wee bit different than they appeared on the screen (whereas the others were spot on) and that the first order I placed was ones that I really, really wanted while this one was more in the category of "Hmmmm...do I want this one?.....or do I want that one?" which basically culminated in my just kind of randomly deciding on two of the multitude that I desire. I still like them though. And maybe when they're knit up I'll be doing imaginary back flips over them like I did with the first order. And yes, sat here for a good 10 minutes with at least one hank of the yarn pressed up to my face while I semi-psychotically inhaled it's fabulousness. The one on the left is STR Henpecked and the other is Little Bunny Foo Foo, both in medium weight. LBFF is essentially Lucy but with pink instead if the blue. In my head I think of it as being grey, but it is in fact a beige-ish color.

On to the next subject.....oddly still related to my new found obsession with STR.

Guess what I have???

Why yes, that's a photo of me relaxing in my super-terrific Monkey socks!

I enjoy standing in them, too.

Here's a closeup of the pattern.

As previously stated, this is the Monkey pattern from Knitty. I used STR lightweight in the Cracked Canyon colorway and size 2 needles to accommodate my humongous feet. I love them.

Now I get to break into the new stuff: )-

One down

I'm loving my Monkeys. I'm also loving my STR. Big time. The sheer awesomeness of my socks is so great, in fact, at it may case somewhat of a family rift. My mom, who doesn't even wear socks, picked up my completed Monkey and put it on her dirty foot. She then asked me which color I was going to make her a pair in. My first reaction was to go to BMFA's and show her the colors. The underlying plan being, of course, to throw a hank or two into the order for myself. But then.....then......ughhh. I don't even want to say it. She wants my new Lorna's Laces. My new, pretty, pink Lorna's Laces for which I had already printed out a little pattern which was carefully placed in a it's own special plastic sleeve just waiting for my Monkeys to be finished. After I picked up the crumbles of my heart, I quickly formulated a new plan. I would order more or the Tickled Pink and get a few hanks of the Vera colorway, too. Then I thought better. It's very rare that I can knit with the same yarn multiple times. I get bored and part of the whole sock yarn draw is the novelty of color. I decided to just not be selfish and make her the freakin' socks.......except then I had a big realization while I was freakishly sitting up in my office staring across the room at the yarn I had spread out over the adjacent chair. The Tickled Pink has a great big glob of purple in it! So does the Rhodonite colorway from BMFA that I've been stalking. The new and improved (and tentatively final) plan is this. Purchase the Rhodonite and knit both it and the Lorna's Laces. Then I can fully consider the extra yarn purchase as being part of a highly involved experiment. Excellent!

So I was going to Chick-Fil-A for dinner.......

Oops. I forgot that the JoAnns with the big yarn section lives right across the street from the Chick-Fil-A in Columbia. So, while I intended to run out and come home with some chicken nuggets, I came home with this instead.

The guy who checked me out asked me if I was a new knitter. I felt a little bad about being asked this because I still carry a bit of buying-shitty-yarn shame. I said that no, in fact I was NOT a novice and explained my predicament about being in town to buy some chicken, but being so close to yarn of virtually any sort makes me go a little nutty sometimes. He then asked me if I liked the color green. Hmmmmm. The darker colored ones are Patons (not too shitty) wool and the other ones that have more convoluted coloration are something so cheapo and terrible that I won't even mention the name. Come to think of it, I don't even know off hand what the name is. Anyhow, it' absolute crap but I like the colors they come out with.

Maybe the next day or the day after that, I stopped by FiberWorks while waiting for a prescription of my mom's to be filled.......two towns or so away.

The maroon yarn is something from Universal. We just started carrying the company at the shop, but we didn't get in any of this stuff. The other yarn is some new stuff from Online, producer of the yarn in my fabulous orange socks. In all honesty I probably wouldn't have actually bought the stuff if Rene hadn't been so kind as to go out of her way to show me where it as on the shelves and show me a poster of it. Its interesting and stripes in a very oddball sort of way, bu I'm just not really feeling the jacquard (or however one spells it) yarn at the moment. And the needles....ahhhhh, the needles. Pretty, pretty, cheap, plastic needles. I love them so. I had to run out to Micheal's to pick up something random and naturally couldn't go without getting myself a prize, too. I've been wanting these needles for a fair amount of time because I like the colors and truth be told, I really don't care too much about using plastic needles for things that aren't teeny tiny.

A few days later I had to go back to Michael's in search of paper Easter grass for a basket I was assembling for my grandpa.

This yarn is extremely pretty, and feels a bit like an old brillo pad. Oh well. I'll suffer through. It's really not that bad and I figure when I combine it with the boucle, it'll be better.....slightly. I really like it though and think it'll make a nice scarf. I like he way the pink and brown goes together.

Speaking of pink, look what just came in the mail!

Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock in Tickled Pink and Flame. Yay! Clearly, my mental status is flailing. I think that maybe subconsciously I'm getting nervous about the prospect of being dirt poor while I'm in grad school. By buying a non-sensical amount of yarn now, maybe I'm just trying to set myself up with a little something nice for later.

Oh, and just to feel just a weeeeeee bit better about the yarn purchases. here is a little baby WIP shot.

In case you can't tell, it's part of a Monkey. That seems to be the definitive thing to do nowadays. This is the Cracked Canyon colorway from BMFA in lightweight. I LOVE it. In fact, I love it so much that no sock pattern was deemed worthy for it. I had some massive trouble at first since I seemed to hate everything that would perhaps detract from the yarn. The pattern may be a bit busy for the yarn, but I'm fine with it and I think that's about as close to being very happy with a pattern as I'm going to get. BTW, a new color palette is being being released this coming week I believe. I'm a tad panic stricken that they'll remove some of the colorways that I'm still stalking. I hope not.

Sad day

My guinea pig Angel passed away at about 3:15 this morning. I'm very, very sad about this. He was seven, maybe even eight years old. That's quite a run for a guinea pig. He was one of my most favorite guinea pigs of all time.

That's him on the lower right. The cowlicky one with the white nose. It's sad to even look at the picture because everyone in it is dead now. Angel used to like to chase Beau around and bite her tail. Sad, sad, sad......

The worst part is that I knew he was dying for a few days. He got super sick yesterday morning and I kept checking on him all day. Finally, at about 7, I thought he was dead and I went and made him a little coffin and dug a little grave. When I went to get him though it turned out that he was till alive, and we just had to wait until early morning. That was horrible beyond belief. At least now he's not suffering or anything. I HATE burying animals though. I can think of few things worse than having to deal with all that. I'm just not cut out emotionally for such things.

Alright, not much else to report. I haven't been knitting too much.....or at least have nothing to show for what efforts I've made. In fact,I pretty much am moving backwards knit-wise because I decided last night that I need to frog my Caruso socks due to sizing issues. Once I get that sucker on my leg I'm fine, but I just can't deal with the fight of pulling it over my heel. I keep feeling like I'm going to snap all the slipped stitches in half. No good. Hopefully the rest of the week will be more cheery and I'll get more fun stuff done.

I had thought of a witty header......

When I was driving around tonight I though of something that would be the perfect title for this post. However, sometime between then and now, it's escaped me. First things first. Someone was kind enough to gift this upon me.

Notice the freakish, large saw. Why,in the name of all that is holy, would a gnome carry a large saw?? This to me is undeniable proof against the notion that all gnomes are friendly, forest dwelling protectors of nature. Nature isn't protected by giant saws. Here is another shot of him, the evil gnome-of-toe-chopping, as I expect to find him one night, slowly creeping through the darkness of my bedroom to de-toe me.

The above photo is quite dark so depending on how your screen is, you may have to tilt your head or something to partake of the horror.

Okay, that being taken care of..........there's something I want you all to see! It's beautiful, and it made me truly feel like an addict when I opened it.

Yes, my STR arrived. In fact, I already have one sock of it finished! On the left is heavy-weight Lucy and on the right is light-weight Cracked Canyon. They're both quite lovely.

I love, love, love it! The heavy-weight is soooo dense. It as crazy to feel it against the lightweight. I can't wait until the medium weight comes back in stock...which should be next week. Excellent. Well, I guess that's all for now. I have a bunch more to show, but the batteries on my camera died and I haven't had a chance to photograph any of it yet. Now I think I'll go back to my CSI:Miami marathon. I had to momentarily leave the room to avoid seeing that cheese commercial where they butcher EMF's fun hit "Unbelievable" by their musical proclamation that their product is 'crumbelievable'. Perhaps it's just me, but that commercial truly drives me insane. Fun.

If you don't have anything nice to say......

I've been feeling a little jaded for the past few days. As most of you know, this past year (or couple of years, but who's counting) has been filled with various unforeseen stresses and I, as would be expected, have been more stressed out than usual. I have big time wander lust and usually get the opportunity to travel at least 3 times a year. In October I was supposed to go to Atlanta and was sooooo looking forward to the trip. That got cancelled because my dad died maybe a week before we were supposed to go. Then I was supposed to go to Pittsburgh in January. Not a huge deal there, but Pittsburgh isn't here so it's good enough. Then I was supposed to go to Toronto maybe a week or two ago. That was another that had me excited. Toronto = hometown of various wrestlers, the Yarn Harlot, and Lettuce Knit, which conveniently carries STR. So I've been feeling stressed, stressed, stressed and claustrophobic about the DC/Baltimore area with no real option for escape.
This, being my Spring break, was supposed to be some sort of great, relaxing event for me. I like to believe in the "work hard, play hard" mentality....but have been finding that it's more "like work hard, then work hard some more.....and maybe sleep some" for me. My Spring Break, until today, consisted of working, cleaning, hiding from family, driving old people around, sitting in our lawyer's office for hours upon hours.....you get the point. Last night though, a plan was born. It had occurred to me while I was trying not to nod off at the lawyers that I should have just taken off for the yarn shops in Rockville. Since it was too late to do anything about it then, I decided to go today. Soon after that I recalled that a Dog the Bounty Hunter marathon plays on Tuesday nights, which I usually can't watch b/c of school. That made all the crappy Spring Break stuff fade into nothing. Anyhow.....onto to the yarn stuff. I guess it kind of makes up for the not going anywhere.
First, I went to Wool Winder's in Rockville. I had done some research on them last night and found that they had a great deal of yarn listed on their inventory and had their prices listed as well. I drove for quite some time to get there, and got lost only once. Keeping with the title of this post, I was very impressed with my parallel parking skills. I was not aware that my parking skills would be called upon like that, but I took on the challenge and was victorious. One may say that it was the trip highlight. Additionally, the owner of the shop was very nice to me. I came away with much less than I had anticipated, but one thing was way worth the trip.

Silly me hadn't realized that this bad boy was out on the shelves yet. It's way cool......and I almost choked on my own tongue when I flipped it over and saw the price of it while I was pumping gas on the way out of the city. Yes, I like to stand there reading knitting books while I get gas. I also picked up these, which I have mixed feelings about.

I have been regularly eyeing Koigu in the Patternworks catalogues. I had marked some colors that I wanted to order and was very excited that Wool Winder's carried it. To tell you the truth though, the colors weren't so hot in real life. Personally, I've never seen the stuff except for some super fug that was at the awesome shop in Texas. Even they said it was nasty and told me to chew out the company people for them at that years MS&W. Also, and I'll go ahead and say this because I talked about it with the staff there, they had maybe 7 colors. The reason for this is that they get in a huge, massively massive order once a year around November and it just trickles away from there. The company i not the best at sending out yarn, but at least they're very honest about it.

I was feeling a little let down about my day and I hadn't found some of the yarn that I was quested for, so I decided to go somewhere else......that I just won't name so I don't get any dirty looks. There, i picked up these.

The greenish/yellowish stuff is this killer Trekking XXL that I've been hunting and hunting for. In the middle is some Claudia Handpaints fingering weight in Pink Cloud. I have better representations of the color below. On the right is some of Colinette's new sock yarn. I'm not secure with the yardage, but the colors are very interesting and rich. This particular one was just so wacky that I had to take it. It's way more circus-y than I would usually choose, but I like it. Here's a close up of the pink cloud.

You know how much I paid for the Trekking, Colinette, and Claudia?? $20. Yep. Twenty smackeroos. You know how much I paid for at the first shop? Many, many, many. Granted, I got a book. Still.....many, many, many. Not so much what I was looking at price wise on the web.

Okay, so I obviously have quite a bit of sock knitting to do now for the rest of my break. I blame this whole shopping binge on the lovely ladies as Blue Moon Fiber Arts. Perhaps if my account information showed a sent icon instead of an order pending message, none of this would have happened. Hmmmrphhhh.

The Dirtiest Player in the Game

I feel the need to give a quick shout out to the wrestlers of WWE who may be Googling their names today looking for themselves in print. I'd just like to say Randy, Adam, Shane and whomever else that I wish hadn't been mentioned.....Stay off the 'roids guys!!
Okay, now that that's out of the way....am I a great big,dirty ol' cheater? Perhaps.....

It appears that there's a pair of socks on my feet. I use the word "appear" because these socks really don't match at all. I tried (no too successfully, but oh well) to capture their discrepancy in size here.

I believe I mentioned somewhere in a previous post, pre-rampage over the STR on Skrilla's page, that I was put off by the first sock of this final pair and didn't really know what to do. Rather than take the one out and re-knit it, I just knit a second sock with like 10 more stitches cast on and maybe an addition inch of cuff/foot and called it a day. The fact that this may not actually be a fair pair out of my quota of 3 is negligible at this point.........besides, I ordered my STR as soon as that last heel was turned!!! Woooo! Yeah!! And who said I could only order one skein, huh? Those babies are packed up and shipping out! I'll wait until my package arrives to go into details, but it will be a grand day for me. Karma got me good though because if I hadn't been so freakishly gluttonous and impatient with my stalking I would have seen, pre-ordering, that the medium weight yarn that I wanted is anticipated to be restocked the first week of April. I'm not thrilled with the steeper price of the heavy weight and am not exactly secure with the yardage on the light. Hmmm. We soon shall see how they both fare. And I'd be willing to bet that come the first week of April, we'll see how the medium weight works out for my gigantic feet as well.

And I haven't just been busy with the socks!

Okay, so one of these is another pair of socks and I actually plan on casting on for another pair tonight. What can I say? I have a f*cking ton of sock yarn that I have to work thru. That green sock is going to be half a pair of Tweeds from Magknits. I believe I mentioned that endeavor a post or two ago. The scarf is knit in Inca from......someone, and is just a 3x1 rib. It's been quite the popular pattern at the shop. Also, speaking of popular patterns, that purple thing is my short row hat from Interweave. Perhaps that should become the store's project mascot because I know that at least 3 of the 5 of are currently or have recently made one. Mine is special because it's evil. This photo is of the second or third incarnation of it because the bottom line is that the pattern just doesn't fit my wide head. If the circumference is working out, I'd have to be a cone head to accommodate the height. Currently I've sized my needles down to a size 6 and my measurements are still showing too large a gauge. I say screw it all. I'm finishing the damn thing and will shove my head into it regardless of how small/large/misshapen it turns out.

Alright, I've been distracted by the sounds of CSI: Miami floating down from my office. That means I must go, immediately.

GrrrraarrrRRRRGGHHHHH!!!!!!! Noooooooooooo.......

Okay........I so totally just had a mini mental breakdown and literaly almost threw up a little in my mouth from the deadly combo of sheer excitement of looking at yarn that I want and the rage/jealousy of seeing someone else who has it all. I had to check just one more blog before I went to do my work........just. one. more. And what did she have?? Skein after skein of STR, in the SAME colorways I want, that she picked up at Stitches West. I am very upset right now.........I am quite inclined to go to bluemoon fibers and orer every single damn thing that I want and sit here until it shows up on my door. I want my yarn. I want to be in the f*cking sock club. I want to have not set this retarded goal of actually finoshed three friggin' pairs of socks before I order my yarn. I am not a person of restraint. It's ridiculous for me to set rules like that for myself. Yet I did, and I will stick to it. If I break down now I'll lose all faith on myself. It'll be like a heroin addict fresh from rehab taking a hit ( I watched Intervention a lot last night). Hrrrumphhhh. I think I might feel better if I actually threw a temper tantrum, complete with kicking and pounding on the floor. Yes....that would good, and it would be yet another thing I can do to keep myself from writing my paper.

Two and then some down

I finally was able to finish my orange socks. Here they are, being modeled by Dylan.

He woke up a mere moment after I threw the socks on him and I could tell by the look on hos face that he sometimes has serious doubts about the intelligence of humankind......or at least me.

The completion of these socks brings me to 2 out of 3 needed to purchase my STR. I have one sock completed of that last pair but I have mixed emotions about it. The bottom line is that it's too small. It was suggested to me that I just finish the second one and give he pair to my niece. This, of course, is utterly ridiculous considering the fact that the reason I bought the yarn in the first place is because I like it for me. The fools......

To keep myself from thinking too heavily on the matter, I started a pair of Tweeds from Magknits. On par with most other things in my life, they aren't coming out exactly as planned. Perhaps this is because I'm doing something completely different than the pattern says. It calls for using two colors of yarn and doing one row stripes. I figured that I could achieve the same effect by using a self striping yarn that has short repeats. This is not working put so well. The sock itself looks fine, but it doesn't really look like the sock in the picture or that much different really from a basic 2x2 rib. Oh well. It gives me something to do. Speaking of which, I have to go finish writing a long, long, long paper : ( I'd soooo much rather play with my yarn instead.

Copy Cat

I took the liberty of totally ripping off a certain someones project and made a Calorimetry for myself....using the same yarn. At least I chose a different colorway.

It's SWS by Patons in the Natural Earth colorway. I cast on maybe 10 fewer stitches than called for and only worked about 2/3 of the short rows. I don't know that it's quite as wide as the pattern calls for but it's just fine for my weird shaped head. I like the way the colors are depicted in this shot. I'm not so hot on the way my cheek and neck chub are prominently displayed. Oh well. Let me tell you this....I am sooooo proud of myself for my yarn buying restraint. I went a few places looking for this yarn and didn't buy anything else I saw. The fact that I ended up buying multiple balls of it, and then even more when I had to go searching for a button.....well, we just won't count that.

Here is my el-cheapo, yet pretty button which was found in a gigantic bowl of cheapo buttons I bought at Michaels.

This is the first time I've ever sewed a button onto anything in my life. I found that it wasn't too bad.

Oh! And you know what sucks?? I think that knitting socks is hurting my hands! I'm slowing down a little bit and taking time to do things on larger needles so I can see if that helps any. I'm sure it will. At least it better!

Okay....off to do all my super fun school business.

Grace Elizabeth

My nephews girlfriend had her baby on.....some night this week. I'll say Wednesday. That sounds accurate enough. Luckily, I had finished the baby blanket. I didn't exactly wash it or do any pf the nice wrapping bits that I had thought I might do, but hey, the thing gor finished. For me that's pretty good. I still was able to box it up in tissue paper with a book and letter congratulating the girlfriend on surviving such a horrifying event. As I was leaving for the post office, three things occured to me.

1) My box wasn't securely closed.
2) I had forgotten to photograph the blanket.
3) I did not have their address.

Oops.

After some time of making calls, finding and looking through books, unpacking and repacking,an impromptu photo session and a short trip to my grandpa's house the box was ready to go.
Here it is, in fairly bad positioning on my grandpa's office chair.

Here is my crappy attempt to show the colors. It's not too bad of a representation, but it could be better.

In the letter I descibed it as an "all purpose blanket that can be stretched out to fit over big things or balled up to throw into something small, like a car seat." That's a loose cover up of my previous thoughts of " Ooops! This blanket has some super funky measurements now that I have it off the needles! What do I do??"

Anyhow, it's done and shipped. Yay for baby Grace being born safe and healthy. In a related story, I was emailed pictues of the baby yesterday. I literally recoiled when I saw them and it took me a moment to realize,"Oh. It's just a human baby." God bless all those who can look at babies all crusty faced and peely skinned and be proud. I think I'd have to give it a week or two before touching.

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.

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

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.

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.

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......

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.

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.

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.

Beaulina

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.