Destroyed by a Basketball Tournament

So, today is the "March Madness" tournament for Danger Boy's third grade basketball squad. (Yes, I know, but the gym is booked up for March, and "January Madness" doesn't have quite the same ring, does it?)

I promised, cross-my-heart promised, a really-really-really-mean-it promise, that I would go to this tournament. And just for extra oomph, I called Miss Seven and my godson to ask them to come along. They're pretty excited because their alternative plans for this evening would have been playing in the kiddie care room at the racquet club while their parents get in a game or two. Sugar highs and cheering for little boys who can't dribble, pass, or shoot -- yes, I can see where that would be the better alternative.

So I'm all set. I have little snack bags packed with blue jelly bellies (leftovers from the winter blues party last weekend), Capri Suns, tissues, advil, pirate bandaids, single dollars for the concession stand, notepads and colored pencils and stickers (in case of boredom -- theirs), and -------

Crap. I don't have any socks on the needles.

I can't take the Fulmar sleeves because they're too complicated for that environment. Ditto the Fair Isle bag, which requires charts. I haven't cast on the sleeves for the cabled cardigan, and I need to find my notes on how to do the flippy-uppy short rows in order to even think about it. Branff -- I need different needles. The pink sweater is at the seaming stage, no good for working in bleachers. And the Catherine Parr is too heavy and cumbersome to work on without good supports under my elbows.

That leaves St. Brigid, which I want to re-swatch on 6s. I can do that. It will take me through maybe the first period of the first game. And then what????

No rational knitter would expect any other rational knitter to get through an entire third grade basketball tournament without knitting, would you? Or, to speak the lingo of the day, can I get a by on this one? How about if I promise, really-really-really-mean-it promise, to finish the pink sweater on Saturday before casting on St. Brigid Sunday?

(Ahem. Note to Mr Puffy and other interested persons: I'm thinking snickets.)

That's Two

One of my goals is to cut down on the number of OTN projects this year, and I figured I would accomplish that by not casting on something new until I finish two items. Easy enough, right?

So, I have finished two pairs of socks this year, which gives me permission to cast on St. Brigid on February 1 as planned. Yay! Well, except that now there aren't any socks OTN, and I'll have to finish two sweaters in order to cast on another pair of socks. Which doesn't seem to make much sense somehow. Clearly, I will need to think through my rules a bit more carefully for next year.

Here are the deets:
Yarn: Filatura di Crosa Maxime Print
Needles: Size 1.5US Crystal Palace double points
Cast on: 11/16/08
Cast off: 1/27/09
Pattern: A simple 2x2 ribbing all the way down.

I really like this yarn. Very nice, very cushy and springy and round, much like Dale Baby Ull. I made the legs very long so they could be cuffed and give an extra bit of warmth at my ankles and lower calves. Each one of the color stripes is about an inch thick, so each leg is a notch under 10" long when unfolded. (They are identical in length, to the eighth-inch, but I bent the unfolded leg in the picture to get it to fit better in the frame.)

Now, with that little bit of business out of the way, I must confess why I'm so intent on discussing my "2 projects done before casting on" rule. I just realized today that I have all of the yarn I need to knit the Veronik Avery Fair Isle Cardigan. I promised myself I wouldn't start that until Fulmar was done, and I've been pretty diligent about knitting Fulmar when time and my wobbly knuckle permits. The sleeves are over 9" long now. That's progress. But not enough!

So I'll be good and do what I set out to do, no matter how tempted I am to start the Fair Isle Cardigan RIGHT THIS SECOND.

Speaking of Bastards....

We interrupt this knitting blog to bring you yet another rant about (nim)Rod Blagojevich.

Lookee what the US Congress inserted into the economic stimulus package legislation.

SEC. 1112. ADDITIONAL ASSURANCE OF APPROPRIATE USE OF FUNDS.

None of the funds provided by this Act may be made available to the State of Illinois, or any agency of the State, unless (1) the use of such funds by the State is approved in legislation enacted by the State after the date of the enactment of this Act, or (2) Rod R. Blagojevich no longer holds the office of Governor of the State of Illinois.

The preceding sentence shall not apply to any funds provided directly to a unit of local government (1) by a Federal department or agency, or (2) by an established formula from the State.

In other words, if the Illinois General Assembly fails to convict the bastard on his impeachment charges, Illinois doesn't get to participate in the economic stimulus package. My sense is that, in that case, the state's share of the money will instead go directly to counties or munies. The last sentence leaves that open as a possibility without requiring it. Except that I think it would be unconstitutional to apply this clause exactly as written -- not sure, but it smells like week-old fish to me.

But we'll never know for sure if it's constitutional or not, because it ceases to be an issue the moment (nim)Rod is convicted. Which they damn well better do. Fast.

Go, General Assembly, Go!

Kismet

This is my swatch for St. Brigid, which a few of us in my local SnB plan to start on February 1. I swatched it last night, for the fourth time, and I'm still not sure if I have gauge. The first three times, I measured the wrong number of stitches in the swatch and couldn't figure out why my gauge was so wild. This time, about halfway through the swatching process, my knuckle started to act up and my gauge changed. I was on gauge before my knuckle started swelling. But I lost a stitch per four inches after it began to hurt.

So do I assume I will get gauge as long as I knit with a healthy hand?

As I pondered this question, I googled St. B, and here are a few fun facts about her.

* She is the patron saint of bastards. Which seems appropriate, somehow.

* Her saint day is February 1. The same day we picked to cast on the sweater. Cue the Twilight Zone music.

* She was sort of famous as a child for giving away stuff to anyone who knocked on her father's door, which was a source of considerable strain between Brigid and her father. At first, she mostly gave them milk. But when she gave her father's jeweled sword to a leper, her father put her in a convent.

* Eventually, she founded a convent of her own, and as she was being consecrated as its Abbess, the priest accidentally made her a bishop instead. For about 500 years after this, all the Abbesses at this convent had the rank of bishop.

* Some say she never existed at all, but that early Christians swiped existing Celtic legends about a goddess Brigid (or Brid, pronounced breed) and stamped Christian ethics onto the existing faith. This was a very common conversion practice, but it seems pretty likely that she may have lived, seeing how there's a tomb with her name on it.

So there you have it. We all now have permission to mutter "Bastard!" whenever this pattern irritates us. And I think I'd better wait until February 1 to cast on. It is, after all, her day.

Things I Am Heartily Sick Of

I'm heartily sick of shoveling my walk. We pay good money to the homeowners association to have this taken care of. As you see, that is money well spent.



















Words can't describe how sick I am of having to brush and scrape my car. Do you think we could have just ONE MEASLY DAY where we don't have to do that? Is that too much to ask?

















And the bobcat. Oh, the bobcat. Yeah, I'm sick of that, too.

























And don't even get me started on Catherine Parr. It has been living quietly in its bag for weeks, taunting me with the knowledge of how close it is to being finished. But even after my knuckle returned to normal human proportions, I couldn't bring myself to take CP out of the bag. Sick of it. Sick of everything.

Luckily, there's a cure for the winter blues. Throw some hot cocoa into the mix (spiked with something medicinal, of course), and we've got the recipe for a new and improved mood.

Why Brains Matter

This is what happens when you have killed your brain. You try to do something simple like sew up some shoulder seams, and end up with -- well, good god, I have no idea what that is. A mess. And not only did I totally screw it up, but I managed to screw it up in two completely different ways. See on the right side of the picture, where the seam has a row of bumps sticking out? That's because I sewed the seam in the wrong place and left half the cast-off sticking out. And see on the left where -- well, I'm not sure exactly what happened there.

All I'm saying is, good thing I can unpick that seam.

I'm taking the day off today. Well, "off" meaning it's just gone past noon, and I've only worked an hour this morning, and probably won't work more than an hour or two later today. The last two days, about everything I've tried to do has turned out like that seam, so it's obviously time for some R&R.

I'm going to try for a little knitting this afternoon and see how the finger holds up. And I'm going to lay on the couch with the clicker for at least an hour. Maybe even take a nap. Naps are good.

And by the end of it, maybe, just maybe, I'll remember the right way to sew a shoulder seam. (sigh)

First FO of the New Year

All I had left to do on these socks was the toe of the second sock. Not a lot, not more than an hour or so of knitting. I can't knit much right now, but a round here and a round there, and before you know it, your socks are done.

This is the Alpaca Sox yarn. So soft, and the finished fabric has an almost velvety feel. We'll see how they wear and launder. I have a feeling the yarn might be tender.

I've sewn the shoulders together for my pink sweater, but I don't have the right circular needle for the neckband, so that's on hold until I can get to the knitting shop. That might be a while. Work is pretty demanding right now.

How to Not Knit

So far, in the quest to rest my index finger, I have:

1. Blocked the pink sweater. I did it in stages, and the final stage was the sleeves, which you can see here. They look like they're two different sizes, but that's because of the funny camera angle you get when you stand on tiptoe with your arms way overhead.
2. Wound off about eight skeins of yarn. I have to do that slowly, with long breaks between skeins, because the crank irritates my knuckle.
3. Put loose patterns into plastic sheet protectors in binders.
4. Spend eleven million hours browsing patterns on ravelry. I've been in the habit of storing patterns I like in my favorites folder. And then one day, my favorites folder was suddenly empty. I've spent some time trying to recreate it -- ha! as if that can ever happen -- and printing loose copies of freebie patterns I'd like to knit.
5. Found a sock pattern for some green Cascade Heritage sock yarn to match Catherine Parr. I wanted a diamond-like trellises that mimicked the Catherine Parr cable chart without actually being that chart. Because I'm sick of knitting that chart. The answer arrived in the form of Snicket socks, formerly of Magknits and currently a ravelry download.
6. Reorganized my knitting bookshelf. Knitting books are so oddly shaped. They never line up in a pleasing fashion.
7. Read my Harmony guides and other chart books for substitute cable patterns for my FLAK, which I expect to cast on in two weeks or so. I'm currently leaning towards a summer motif -- a trellis cable up the center, some vine and leaf cables on either side.
   
8. Stared dolefully at my knitting, wishing I could touch it.
9. I tried to make a pot of soup, but can't chop vegetables with a wonky index finger. Pizza!
10. Moved all the yarn for knits-in-progress out of the back room dresser where I so cleverly put it for safekeeping. Thank goodness I found it.
    

The swelling is going down, and the pain is fading. I knit a half a round of the gray socks last night, trying it out, but the knuckle started to twinge almost immediately. A couple more days rest should do it.

Also, movies are way more enjoyable when you can knit through them. I don't know how non-knitters can just sit there and stare at the screen. I kept wanting to make popcorn just so my hands would have something to do. But I watched Duchess, the Keira Knightley/Ralph Fiennes adaptation of the Amanda Foreman book. It was very good. I didn't expect to enjoy it because Keira Knightley annoys me, but she was restrained enough to be watchable. Shame it wasn't a faithful rendering of the historical character, who was far more interesting and quirky than the movie would have you believe.

And I watched Burn After Reading, which was about as good a Coen brothers movie as I've ever seen. Definitely worth renting.

Emergency! Help Needed!

I have a four-day weekend. My plan was to go to The Fold yesterday, go hang out with with friends this afternoon, and spend the rest of the time knitting and reading at home. (Yes, "days off" doesn't mean I stop reading submissions. I never stop reading submissions.)

I rented four movies to put the cherry on top of the weekend, and last night, as I was knitting a sock gusset and watching the first movie, I got a little twinge in the knuckle at the base of my right index finger. Within an hour, it had swelled to the size of a small plum.

Ice and aspercreme have helped the swelling go down a lot, but it still hurts. I can't knit! Why, why, why does this have to happen this weekend?

So tell me, before I tear out all my hair from frustration -- if you had blocked out some knitting time, and then couldn't knit, what would you do instead?

ETA: My house is already clean. And I don't want to work more than a token amount, maybe just 3 or 4 hours a day. I'm looking for fun stuff, preferably knitting related, that won't strain that knuckle. (cry)

Happy New Yarn!

Starting a stash diet for the new year is an utter impossibility when you live two counties away from an amazing yarn shop, and that amazing yarn shop has its annual blowout sale on New Year's Day.

Today, three carloads of us wound our way up to The Fold, about a 75 minute drive in good traffic with good road conditions. It's worth it even when, like last year, a blizzard slows down the driving.

Last year, I gave myself a stash exception for this particular sale. 30% off all yarn, 40% off all books, and some super discount yarns marked as low as 75% off? I'd be a fool not to take advantage of a sale like that, right?

This year, though, I didn't give myself an exception. I could shop, but within the stash rules for the new year. I wanted to find something for St. Brigid -- see the khaki green yarn -- and I thought I might find a little something in the super discount bin. I didn't, but I fell in love with that chocolate brown undyed Shepherd's Own from Fibranatura, and picked up 3 skeins. Amazing stuff, soft and rich, and my only regret now is not buying more of it.

So I'm starting the new year with 1500 grams added to the plus column. But it could have been much worse, given all the yarns I fondled but left behind.

My stash goal for last year was simple. I wanted to knit as much yarn as I bought, an even grams in / grams out measure. Sock yarn was exempted, and if you leave sock yarn out of the tallies, I ended up knitting 83% of the yarn I took in. (9536 grams in, and 7910 grams out.) If you leave out the yarn I received as gifts, and factor in the pink sweater, which is off the needles but not quite a finished item yet (still needs seams and a neckband), then that number climbs closer to 95%. It's not perfect, but it's not bad, all things considered. Too bad the pink sweater isn't a finished object yet! Or that great yarn hog, Catherine Parr!

Happy New Year, everyone!