Wee Widdle Socklet

Don't you just love fresh starts? That's the lure of casting on. We get to begin anew with something that we still haven't screwed up ... yet.

This is the new Regia sock, about an inch into the cuff. (2x2 rib on size 1 needles, if you're interested.) Regia doesn't have clever names, or even unclever names, for its colorways, but this one is labeled Farbe 5752 which I think is the colorway. Partie would be the dye lot, yes? The rest of the ballband is in German, so I'm assuming Farbe and Partie are German terms. For blog labeling purposes, we'll call this one Regia grey striping socks. I think that makes more sense than sticking to the German numerical classification system.

Whatever. It's kind of a nifty assortment of greys with a few dots of smoky blue mixed into the jacquard portion of the pattern. It will knit into thick stripes of charcoal, mid-grey, and a greenish grey, with small stripes of white and smoky blue jacquard separating some of those stripes. I think it will work.

I looked at the Charlene Schurch sock book for ten thousand hours (ok, maybe a slight exaggeration) trying to choose a stitch pattern that would complement the yarn. In the end, I got lazy and decided to use my standard sock recipe for self-striping yarn. knit, knit, knit, knit, around and around in a spiral, with a heel thrown in for a brief dollop of knitterly interest. But hey, it works, and I can make this pattern in my sleep by now.

This will be my carry-around sock for the next couple months. It still amazes me that while waiting in line at the bank, the drive-through, etc etc, you can knit entire socks. Maybe that's one of the consequences of city living, but we sure do seem to wait around a lot.

At some point today, I hope to have time to fix a disastrous cast-off on my recently finished carry-along socks. Normally, I wouldn't cast on the new socks before completely finishing the old ones, but this is a special case. I mean "special case" in the sense of "almost lost my sock mojo and made a giant bonfire out of my sock stash because of this rotten thing." Details of my spectacular failure to follow.

Diet Food

I went to the yarn store today to buy the new IK. This is the same yarn store for which I have a 15% off coupon just about burning a hole in my wallet. I intend to use that coupon to pick up some sweater yarn, but not until after Stitches. Because I am not buying yarn until Stitches, remember?

I think I did okay today. The purple dishcloth cotton is needed to finish off some, well, dishcloths. Imagine that! I needed this solid purple to do a coordinating trim on some leftover variegated from my learn-to-entrelac project last summer. (Entrelac wash cloths ROCK! One side is smooth, and one side is scrubby. Love em!) So I don't mind spending two dollars on a single ball of cotton that will allow me to clear out some old stash. And I don't think it counts as a diet-breaker.

And the sock yarn? Everyone know sock yarn doesn't count! But seriously, you can all be proud of me. I had two skeins of Cherry Tree Hill supersock in hand, and was fondling some very, very intriguing On-Line. Instead of buying the lot, I went for the Regia in grey and black. I wear a lot of grey and black, and there are very few sock yarns to match. So this was a good buy, and it will be knit as my next carry-along project. (My current carry-alongs, the trampoline socks, are one botched cast-off away from FO status.)

All told, I spent around $23. For me, this is practically miraculous self-control. Woot!

Kris Is So In Trouble

Knifty Red tagged me. So here we go ... Seven things you don't know about me. I'll leave you all to decide whether these seven things are worth knowing.

1. I onced crashed the post-party for the Tony Awards. What the heck. It was there, and so was I.

2. I almost got arrested with the Psychadelic Furs. Ah, the 80s. We all got away, except for a roadie who spent the night in jail.

3. You can't name a color I haven't dyed my hair. Once again, the 80s.

4. I wrote my first short story when I was seven. It was about a magic ice cube. My mom still has it.

5. Indianapolis still feels like home even though I haven't lived there for almost 6 years. When I dream that I am home, home is one particular apartment I had in Broad Ripple.

6. Bread is my favorite food. I have made countless dietary changes to cope with a metabolic disease, but I will never give up bread.

7. I love working in publishing. I've worked in other fields, but publishing is where I belong. I sometimes joke that my epitaph should say, "Born to edit, doomed to write." Except I'm kind of serious about that.

I'm supposed to tag seven other people and write the rules of the meme in my blog, so here goes. blah blah blah...... You know, I've really never been one for rules. Maybe that should have been one of the items on my list?

Random Tuesday

In honor of Becca and her fledgling yarn company, this blog entry will be Random Tuesday after my favorite colorway at Froebe Fibers.

I asked Miss Six to pick a number between one and ten -- she is a marvelous random number generator -- and she picked fourteen. See? Totally random. As her second choice, she picked seven. So here are seven random things for a Tuesday night.

1. The Red Heart Afghan a/k/a Dead Fart Crapghan is hooking right along. I finished a skein of that insanely bright and hideous yarn, and decided to measure. It's 52" measured along the left side, and 56" along the right. That is one whopping gauge glitch. Told you I suck at crocheting.

2. I'm doing the equivalent of short rowing to try to even out both sides of the blanket. I'll crochet to about the midpoint, then turn and crochet back. I'll intersperse these half rows with a few regular rows. It should be more or less invisible. Especially given that anyone who stares directly into this crapghan will have his retinas burned to a crisp. That tends to hide a lot of sins.

3. To celebrate finishing a skein of Dead Fart, I cast on the sleeves for my husband. The pattern uses short row shaping to create these nifty little sleeve points over the back of the hand. I am so digging this. But I've only knit four or five rows total, so there's still plenty of time to grow jaded. (Ha! As if that were possible! I heart Silver Creek yarn!)

4. Miss Six, our very own mermaid, lost a tooth. She says this makes her scary face even scarier.



















I think she might be right about that one. Sure scares me.

5. This is the view from my home office window. If my slush pile gets too big, I can't open the interior shutters and enjoy the view of my little courtyard. Which is darn good motivation to keep the slush pile low.
















6. If you take a closer look at the right side of that picture, you'll see this:

And now you know why my window is ajar. That 6-foot lilac hedge is perfuming my entire house. Love it. They grow under the spare bedroom window, which is also cranked wide open.




7. I finished the Marie Antoinette book. Good stuff, and a truly random read. Someone handed it to me in Houston as I was awaiting my airport ride, and it was someone other than the author. Usually, at publishing conferences, the reverse is true. I stuffed it in my carryon because my other baggage was already locked. Good thing I did. There was far too much turbulence on that flight to risk any knitting, and I devoured half the book before the plane touched down. If you enjoy historical fiction, this one is definitely worth snagging from the Border's 3-for-2 table. The author manages to paint a sympathetic picture of Marie Antoinette while still demonstrating how this woman became a lightning rod for French discontent. Clever, clever author.

There you have it. Random Tuesday, times seven.

My Secret Shame

I'm very sorry to have to show you all this picture. This is about four feet of the butt-ugliest blanket known to humankind. Yes, it's really this bright. And yes, it's really crocheted. Sorry to say.

I have a strange relationship with crochet. It was my gateway drug, the craft I learned at my grandmother's feet that led me to all my other obsessions. The pattern for this hideously patriotic blanket was one of grandma's two signature patterns, and I'm the only one who knows her patterns out of her 60 or so descendents. (Yes, really that many, and no, I don't know the exact number, because after the first few dozen, who can be bothered to count?)

In her life, grandma crocheted like a machine, pumping out blanket after blanket at a rate that would make a superhightech robotics factory look lazy. Need a blanket for a queen sized bed? Give her three weeks and 6 pounds of Red Heart, and you got it. As did everyone else in our family. We all have mounds of hand-crocheted afghans, so many that we began to treat them as if they were disposable. Or easy to make. (They're not.)

When Grandma passed away, my nieces and nephews were still quite young and hadn't yet been deluged with acrylic. One of my nephews has a baby blanket from her hands, but Gran got a headache one day when he was still in diapers, and that was it. No more crocheting and, eventually, no more Gran.

I decided to make these afghans for my nieces and nephews as a way of continuing her tradition, but the truth is, I don't really like crocheting. It makes my tendonitis flare up, and anyway I'd rather knit. (Who wouldn't?) So these blankets really are a labor of love, with the accent on labor. I slog through them, dc after dc, and occasionally shove a half-made blanket into the back of the closet to give my wrist a break and to return with relief to my knitting needles.

The above afghan is over two-thirds done, but I've been ignoring it for months. It's number three of five, and the young lady destined to receive number four is frothing with impatience because her big brother already got his. (His was the first of the five. Seems like a loooooooooong time ago that I gave him his. Long enough ago that when he unfolded it, he gleamed and said, "You made mine big because when I grow up, I'm going to be big like my daddy!" Ah, the all-too-fleeting hero worship stage.)

This red, white and blue abomination is intended for my fifteen-year-old nephew who is mad for all things military. He also likes Nickelback, baseball, and the fact that he will get his learner's permit this year. He picked out the color scheme, and I'd like to deliver a finished afghan before he's old enough to realize how insanely ugly this thing is. The only way to do that is to force myself to it.

So I hereby pledge to crochet one entire ball toward this afghan for every knitted piece I finish. By knitted piece, I mean piece. Not garment. One sock, one sleeve, one hat -- these are all pieces. One piece knitted, one ball crocheted. Given that it takes at least ten balls of crapalicious Red Heart to make one of these afghans, I don't think I'm in danger of giving up crochet any time soon. Sorry to say. sigh....

Surrender

This is what sheep look like when Bethany squeals at them. They turn fleece and run.

Notice the babies. All together now --- aaaawwww!

Seriously, though, here is the story behind this picture. Becca says this proves we are all three years old.

As we were leaving The Fold with fourteen!! hundred!! dollars worth of knitgoodies, heading down the long driveway, Kris suddenly noticed that the front paddock was full of sheep. She politely informed us of this fact by shouting something along the lines of, "Oh! Sheep! Oh! Sheep! Oh!" And then she opened her car door and hopped out to investigate.

Did I mention that Becca was driving? As in, Kris jumped out of a moving vehicle? Yeah. It's that Fold mojo. Something about that place makes us all a bit, well, yanno. I'm convinced it's the yarn fumes. You breathe the air in that place, and suddenly it makes sense to run out of a moving car because there are sheep in the paddock.

So of course -- because as art imitates life, so knitters imitate sheep -- we all jumped out of the car and followed Kris down the short slope to the paddock. In our haste, some of us may have failed to close our car doors all the way. Or we may have left them totally agape. Whatever. Which leaves poor Becca alone in a vehicle once full of knitters, rolling down a driveway with her doors open, as Kris in her excitement tries to remember the word for baby sheep.

But Kris was in better shape than blogless Bethany, who gave up all pretense at language skills in favor of squealing like a little girl. Bethany's got her a powerful set of lungs, dudes. That girl can get some volume. Loud enough for the sheep to panic and bolt for the back paddock. Loud enough for Toni's son to dash out the front door, half a desperately needed sandwich in hand, to ask if we were all right.

Knitter's alright
Spinner's alright
They just seem a little weird...

(*Sorry. Too much Guitar Hero lately. I can't seem to get Cheap Trick out of my head.)

Someday, the sheep may muster the courage to return to the front paddock. As for us getting any smarter -- well, someday the sheep may return to the front paddock, and that's going to have to be enough to satisfy us all.