Ahh....

After ripping out the beret, I realized I had the opportunity to rethink the color. I love the color changes in the skein of the Noro silk Garden, but my particular skein started with a shade of hot pink that was rather too similar to the purple base yarn. I was afraid that the center top of the beret would end up looking sort of muddled because those two colors were so close to each other.

After consulting with some people who have already finished theberet, and learning that yarn can run a little bit tight on this project, I decided to simply wind the ball inside out and start from the other end of the skein.This let me start with the green. I think it works better.

I also fell into the black hole of sleeve knitting today. I knit about 14 rows on Fulmar,and ended up gaining only 3/8 of an inch in total sleeve length.

But the real big news is a little splurge that I picked up to make my work life for little easier. I've been threatening to get voice recognition software for quite a while now,and today I did it. I'm dictating this blog post into a headset and watching the words magically appear on the screen. Once I get the hang of this I'll be able to knit and dictate at the same time. There is a learning curve, but it's not as difficult as I thought it would be. I have to say, I think this is could be some of the best money I spend all year. In fact, true confession--yes, you knew this was coming --I'm knitting a pair of socks as I dictate this. Me like. :)

A Happy Saturday

Now that's a great chair. Who can mind about the mess when the mess is made from knitting? I could spend the entire weekend happy in that chair. And I aim to try to do just that.

























The sharp-eyed brioche beret knitters among you will see the problem in this picture right away. Heck, doesn't even require sharp eyes to spot this one. It's a major ugly. Screw the prancing pony -- you could almost spot this one from outer space.






















Ah, well. The great thing about knitting is that you can always call a do-over. Or, as in this case, a do-over-and-over. This is the second time I had to rip it out. But I'm starting to grasp the logic (Ha!! logic, that's a good one) behind this stitch, so maybe the third time will be a charm on the old windmill beret.






















Thumbs up on the cashmere mittens. BIG thumbs up. Dude, look at the size of those thumbs. I will win every thumb war I declare in these mittens. With a passel of rambunctious nephews in and out of my house, that is no trivial thing. Bring 'em on.

FO Report: Cashmere Stranded Mittens

Too awesome for mere words to describe. When I am queen of the universe, everyone north of the Mason-Dixon line will get a pair of these mittens in any colors they choose. And then there will be no more wars, except for of the thumb variety, because everyone will be so happy in their cashmere mittens that the fight will go flat out of them, and also it would be really really hard to pull triggers wearing thick, warm mittens like this. Plus which you might get gun oil on the fabric, and nobody would want that.

Yarn: Debbie Bliss Pure Cashmere, appx 75 g each color (slightly more of the purple)
Pattern: Mittens from Halland from Folk Mittens
Mods: I changed the placement of the thumb on the left mitten, and it worked out just fine. By my reading, if I hadn't made that modification, I would have ended up with two right hand mittens. If I had to do it over again, I might also move the thumbholes about two rows closer to the wrists. Other than that, no modifications. It was an easy pattern.

I can't tell you how long it took to knit these. A while, several months, except that I didn't knit diligently at all. There was a crib blanket and a vest and some socks mixed in, and these mittens were something I picked up for a change of pace now and again. Working with this yarn felt like a reward -- I am absolutely in love with this yarn. Yes, the Debbie Bliss cashmeres took some PR hits a while back, but I don't care. It's spectacular to knit with.

And now there are eight....

A Sheepish Fairy Tale

Once Upon A Time,
There was a knitter with a slight case of controlitis. You know what I mean. She's the kind of woman with a database for her patterns. The kind of woman who knows to a penny how much she spent on yarn this year. The kind of woman with rules -- no, let's not call them rules. Let's call them parameters which define her comfort zone.

And this woman's comfort zone turns to shit when she has projects on the needles numbering in the double digits.

So, when our intrepid knitter realized she had ten projects otn (plus the crapghan, which we never, ever discuss in polite circles), there was only one possible solution. Cancel all weekend plans. Go to the grocery store and lay in a three-day supply of nomz, then stop at the video store for a stack of dvds. Then drag all nearly completed knitting projects to the awesomely comfy knitting chair by the big tv, and GET THAT NUMBER INTO SINGLE DIGITS!!!

Ahem. Pardon me. I get a little twitchy when I'm outside my comfort zone.

And then there were Nine....

FO Report:
Sandesgarne Sisu Socks
Cast on April 7 or thereabouts.
Knit plain while reading manuscripts.
56 stitches around on size 1.5 US needles.

Not much to say. The yarn is sort of lofty and I'm concerned about how it will wear. It just has that sneaky look like it will felt if I take my eyes off it for two seconds. But we'll see.


Closing in on Eight....

I took this picture when the pieces were only half-pinned, so they look a bit wobbly here. And it was a little tricky to pin out the front piece with the bust darts, because the darts make the fabric 3-dimensional. But I did the best I could, and what the heck. I can always reblock it in sections if necessary.

But all that's left of this one is side seams, neckband and upper bodice trim. And weaving. And figuring out what to do about the curl in the fabric. My current preference is those tiny little lead balls they use on fishing lines.

Also, progress is being made on other projects. Stay tuned. This will be a weekend marathon of finishing stuff so I don't go all wacky.

Number Ten

This is what peer pressure looks like. Yes, that's right, peer pressure is half purple and half variegated and is knit on dpns. Who knew.

I've had nine things on the needles for a couple weeks now, ever since I cast on the Veronik Avery halter vest. And I have this rule: my current projects must number fewer than ten. Single digits. This is a lesson learned the hard way -- I get a little nutty when I have too many projects going at once, and I have to knit almost continuously until the mass of knitting bags hanging from doorknobs is no longer threatening to pull the door out of the jamb. It's just this thing I have. Single digits.

And then came Harlot Day.

How do these things happen? One minute, my knit posse is kickin it at the back table of Nana's Knitting Shop, doing our usual thing, plus watching the stream of knitters come through for the Harlot's appearance. And the next minute, someone started fondling some brioche tams, and we were all out of our chairs and diving for the Noro. We've never done a knitalong as a group. And this brioche tam is a hard pattern, a really hard pattern, so as soon as someone suggested doing it as a group, a new zeitgeist was born.

We all bought the yarn and someone downloaded a few copies of the pattern. (It's a freebie online, so nobody needs to holler about copyright, thank you.) Some folks cast on right away, though the official start date was set for last night's Stitch and Bitch gathering. I held off because I wanted to get something off the needles -- hello, single digits? -- but Wednesday night arrived before I could finish anything.

So now there are ten.

And that's one too many for peace of mind. Of course, there can be no peace of mind when one is trying to knit a brioche tam because this is a counter-intuitive and wildly confusing pattern. That little sliver of knitting in the picture? Less than three inches in diameter? Took THREE HOURS and an unknowably high number of bad words. That's some hard knitting.

But I knit two more rounds today, and it's starting to make sense, and I have some other knitting that should be coming off the needles this weekend. So who knows. Maybe this time, peer pressure will turn out to be a good thing.

RIP Cashmere Socks

Well, this is a milestone. I've never had to throw away a pair of handknit socks before. Can't say I like this feeling.

I can't remember exactly when I finished them, but I want to say it was about last fall. So they're babies compared to some of my other socks, which are going on three years old and show virtually no signs of wear. Regia. Swear to God, that stuff is fortified with iron.

So here's the story. I knit those socks out of Jojoland cashmere blend picked up for a song at Stitches Midwest last year. Cashmere socks? Love it! The first time I washed them (in the machine, then in the dryer, while in a lingerie bag, which is about as much babying as I ever give my socks), they felted ever so slightly. Not enough to interfere with the stretch in the fabric, but enough so that I thought I ought to be more careful with these.

They're among my favorite socks for comfort and warmth, right up there with the Dale Baby Ull and the Cherry Tree Hill. I tended to wear them as soon as they were washed and dried. My only concession to their tenderness was to let them dry flat -- I still put them through the washer in the lingerie bag, and there was no further felting, and I bet I washed them like that three times a month for probably eight months. I thought they would be fine.

Until....

I washed them yesterday and pulled them out of the lingerie bag to dry, and felt my heart turn to lead. They had felted, this time for real. While they were still wet, I pulled and tugged on them to try to break up the felting. I put them on my feet -- still wet -- thinking they could block around my feet and loosen up some. It was a struggle to get them on. It hurt my toes to walk in them. They seemed to tighten up as they dried.

I literally had to cut them off.

(cry)

Bye-bye, cashmere socks! Oh, how I loved you! You were too young to die!

Whole Lotta Harlot

We began to gather shortly before lunch at the shop. Before long, the little space was full of the regulars and a couple of visiting rock stars. The light from the beautiful windows was throwing off my camera, but if you look closely, you'll see Stephanie on the left between two baby-cradlin' mamas, and Franklin in the center.


















We migrated to the Hilton ball room in waves. I was one of the last to leave the shop, but it was okay. I still got a seat, front and center with the rest of the volunteers. (See anyone you know?)















She made it this time. Harlot Day is always fun, but it turns out that it's more fun when there's an actual Harlot in attendance. This was my fourth Harlot Day, my third with Herself there, and I've noticed she's growing progressively more contemplative as time passes and books are written. She makes us laugh, but she also makes us think.

























Thank you to Tricia and Stephanie for a fabulous day! (Are they gorgeous or what?)

Curly Girly

This is the vest front. Note the way it pouches at the sides of the breast area from the short row bust darts. After only two tries, the intarsia and bust darts are exactly the way I want them.

The curling at the hem has me worried, but I'll figure it out later.

Team Mine!

I have joined Team Mine! on ravelry for the summer knitting olympics. Only question now is what to knit. We have 17 days. We're supposed to challenge ourselves. Given that my knitting time is about half what it was a year ago, I question whether I could even complete a pair of socks in that time period.

We have some time before we have to declare our project for the team. My top-of-the-head choices are:

1. Most likely candidate: Minnesota mittens. These are the densely knit gloves with the flip-top mitten parts that go over the fingers. I like this pattern because it would give me a double layer of warmth at the fingers -- the individual glove fingers, plus the fliptop mitten part. I'll probably use some purple Jaeger from stash.

2. The lace shell from Veronik Avery's skater set in her book. This was my birthday yarn. I'd like to knit it before the weather turns cold again, but it's not urgent. And frankly, I can knit a mohair lace shirt in 17 days only if I'm nursing a broken ankle and confined to my chair for the duration.

3. Latvian mittens. What the heck. Been wanting to knit them, partly because of some masochistic urge to do stranded knitting on size 0000 needles. And also partly because I think that's the kind of project that can convince me I've got the chops to tackle a Fair Isle sweater someday.

4. ???? Some other option. Any suggestions? Something that can be completed in 17 days would be ideal.

Vote in the sidebar if you care to.

So Much For Quick and Easy

It's my own damn fault. Someday I will learn to content myself with knitting a pattern as written. Until that day, however, I will have plenty of stories like this one to tell.

So I cast on this nifty little striped vest, expecting it to be fast and mindless. It sure started off that way. I knit the ribbing without thinking at all. And then it happened. I read the instructions -- "work stripe pattern and at the same time, work waist decreases at side hems."

Hmm, I thought. If the waist decreases hit just above the ribbing, that means the hem on this thing falls ... yep. Just about navel length. That's not exactly an area of my body I want to call attention to.

So I decided to lengthen the vest by about 3" and change the waist shaping a bit. So far, so good. But then I decided I might as well pull out the old notes from last summer's class with The!! Lily!! Chin!! (*faint*), and add some bust darts.

This wasn't an arbitrary decision. I looked very carefully at all the model photos while considering pattern alterations. The model, typically, has bra cups the size of bottle caps, but the vest was pulling a little across her mammary landscape. So I figured for me -- you know, I've got a pair -- I'd better add some bust darts.

So then I had to decide where to put the bust darts. And how to work the intarsia V-shaped striping at the neckline. Should I change their placement, in light of those added darts? Nah, I decided. I'll just knit the darts and then proceed with the neckline shaping for the pattern as written.

Well, that didn't work. Not unless I wanted to hang the halter straps from my ears instead of from my shoulders. So today I ripped back a good four inches of intarsia and short row shaping, and will proceed with "Neckline/ Take Two" tomorrow.

The good news? I got the darts in the right spot, and the right depth. The bad news? I can harldy breathe and think at the same time, so working those darts and the intarsia at the same time might be, shall we say, interesting.

A Little Excitement

This is a picture of the tornado as it cut through the neighborhood just to the north and west of my sister, before it got to her neighborhood. You can see how wide it is. This was a big'un. Luckily, this part of Monee is rural and largely undeveloped. Even the neighborhoods hardly qualify as actual neighborhoods, but are more like a handful of houses sprinkled in the fields.

A few seconds after this picture was taken, my sister looked out her front room window and lost her mind. She called me on her cell and screamed pretty incoherently. I heard lots of expletives plus the word tornado. I kept asking her, where are you, where are you. The answer, finally: standing by my living room window watching it.

We're lucky Darwin was on vacation last night.

I persuaded her to open the south-facing windows and go into the basement with the dog. That took some doing. Then I was about to suggest she crawl under the pool table -- that damn thing has got to be sturdy, right? plus, heavy -- because I had the news on by then and could see that the storm cell was still hovering over her neighborhood. You never know, when it's that big and powerful, whether it might not spawn some sista twistas.

But before I could suggest the pool table thing, she told me she was back upstairs and the power was out. She said she saw one of her neighbors in the street and wanted to go talk to him and try to call and check up on the kids. I muttered a lot about safety, but she went outside anyway. The cell was dumping a lot of water on them -- like, insane amounts of water, they were almost instantly flooded -- but as near as she could tell while standing in the middle of the monsoon, there was no damage to her house.












This is the gas station on the corner of my sister's neighborhood. This picture shows the tornado actually passing by her house. She and her family are safe and unharmed. The neighborhood sustained some big damage. You can see from the color of the tornado -- it's pretty dark -- that it has been on the ground and picking up dirt and lumber and stray mini-vans.

After this point, it picked up its toes and skipped across the suburbs toward the lake. This appears to be the point where it was on the ground longest -- this stretch between 45 and Cicero along Monee-Manhattan road.

Yep. I'm a Liar. Again.

I know, I know. I was going to spend the summer working on sleeves and mittens. But then things happened. Bad things. Things I can't discuss on the blog because I don't want to get into a family controversy. Suffice it to say that the crib blanket was not exactly received with enthusiasm.

Sometimes, when bad things happen, you just gotta move on.

My yarn therapist, Tricia of Nana's Knits, heard what happened and ravelmailed me immediately to prescribe the immediate application of a new knitting project. Something completely new, with new yarn and a new pattern and new everything. Clean out the bad old mojo, and bring in the new.

The more I thought about it, the smarter that sounded. Of course, it could just have been an excellent way to rationalize a new yarn purchase. Not that I need any help dreaming up excuses. But I really wasn't planning on new yarn or new projects. I was planning on finishing stuff already OTN. I wrote down my goals and everything!

Of course, when she sweetened the deal with a discount, any resistance melted right along with my budgetary conscience. I spent a couple of days dreaming of possibilities -- and wow, what a great way to get over a disappointment like the one I had over the weekend. So what if they didn't care about all my hard work? I could make something new. And better. And just for me.

Something simple and quick, something I could whip out in no time and thereby regain that feeling of pride, of accomplishment.

Something by Veronik Avery, who probably has good manners. (Humor me. I want to believe it. Therefore it must be true.)

And then when my personal Color Committee showed up for open knitting Thursday, they helped me pick out some wonderful colors -- thanks to Beth and Red for their help, and sorry if I was dithering too long.

Thirteen soft, delicate new balls of Bollecine Dolly in charcoal heather, ice green, and turquoise. Could you just drool over those colors? The Committee did a great job on their selections. I'm in love with this yarn. I cast on right then and there.

Trish nobly refrained from having a heart attack when I skipped the gauge swatch. Hey, doll, you'll be glad to know I'm spot on with stitch gauge and a little tight on row gauge. See? There is a God, and He likes me best.

Now, back to my knitting. This one is going to be knit in record time. For mental health purposes only.

What Ever Happened to Monthly Goals?

How does this happen? You cross an item off your task list and say, "Woo hoo! We're almost done with April goals!" And then you look at the calendar and discover you're four days into June. ::sigh::

April and May were swallowed almost whole by work problems, foundation repairs, and the crib blanket. Okay. It happens. All you can do is move forward, right?

So here is my forward.

1. Knit the stranded, felted bag that's been languishing in a bag in the closet. It's pretty. It deserves to be finished. Plus, the selfish knitters on ravelry are doing a felted bag KAL. So that give me a good excuse to pull this one out and add some inches.


















2. Work on Fulmar's sleeves when time and attention permit. This one requires some concentration, and work has been sapping my focus lately, so I'll save the Fulmar sleeves for blocks of time that will allow me to concentrate on what I'm doing. Last night, for example, I took an hour off to watch tv and knit Fulmar, and the first thing I noticed was that I knit the wrong pattern row in the check rib filler stitch, so I had to rip and reknit that before I could go forward. I'd rather avoid doing that sort of thing in the first place!

So, when my brain is too fried to follow a stranded chart or to count the Fulmar rows properly, I'll work on

3. Socks. There's nothing in the world more suitable for my bouts of mindless knitting than a plain sock. Right now I have three socks OTN, one plain, one lace, and this one--













This is the first sockotta 2x2 ribbed sock knit on eenie-beenie needles that threaten to snap like twigs every time I k2tog. The ink has worn off these needles, but I'm pretty sure they're size 0.

I chose the 2x2 rib because sockotta is heavy on cotton, low on stretch. Ribbing compensates for that.






So that's it for June. I'm trying to keep it low key because work really is nutty right now. Nutty in a good way, but still nutty.

Mosaic Me Game

The concept:
a. Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr Search.
b. Using only the first page, pick an image.
c. Copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into fd's mosaic maker.

The Questions:
1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food?
3. What high school did you go to?
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. Favorite drink?
7. Dream vacation?
8. Favorite dessert?
9. What you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love most in life?
11. One Word to describe you.
12. Your flickr name

Tip of the hat to Camillaknits for this game.