Skinny Update

One Down! Mumblety-mumble to go!


That's right, kids, we're officially chalking up a tick mark in the "pounds lost" column. Because of the way my weight fluctuates (thank you, broken endocrine system), I check my weight by weighing three days in a row and averaging the numbers. And I somehow can never remember to do it three days in a row. So weigh-ins happen but official weights might not be calculated all that often.


Anyway.


It's a pound. A real pound, too, 35000 calories worth of ugly fat, and not just some hormonal fluctuation. So we'll take it with glee.


The big Skinny-4-Stash adventure has not been without its ups and downs so far. First, and the biggest down by far, is the damn Halloween candy. I get a quarter for stash enhancement for every day that I stick to my diet, right? And every day, there was the same bag of peanut butter cups staring me in the face. And it's a quarter. Twenty five puny little cents. Can't buy yarn for a quarter. Or not yarn you'd want to knit with, anyway. It just feels too easy to give up a quarter, like a quarter isn't all that meaningful. Especially cuz, did I mention the peanut butter cups?


I've only earned a small handful of quarters so far, nowhere near where I should be. I haven't been a total failure -- the new diet the doctor approved is a really hard adjustment, but I'm working on it and having some successes. It's a journey. Not a destination. And so far, I'd say I'm making progress but nowhere near hitting my stride.

There have been some other factors, too. After the treadmill at our neighborhood clubhouse broke, I joined a gym. This was a good move because the neighborhood clubhouse's hours weren't always convenient, and now that excuse has been eliminated.


My membership came with some free meetings with a trainer, and I've been taking advantage of that this week. I get a quarter for every mile walked on the treadmill, right? The trainer has had me doing everything but the treadmill. Which means zero quarters for miles walked, even though I've been in the gym pretty regularly.


Good thing I'm not in this for the money. Oh. Wait. I do want the money! Money is stash! Dang.

So with a few weeks' experience under my belt, I am modifying my payouts a little. I get a quarter for every day I stick to my diet, and a bonus quarter for every day with no animal fats. I get a quarter for every mile on the treadmill, too -- none of that has changed.

But I'm going to add these new rules. I get a quarter for every 15 minutes spent doing something at the gym other than the treadmill. Weights, nautilus, elliptical machine, whatever. 15 minutes = 25 cents.

And I want to give myself a bonus quarter for every three consecutive days I stick to my food plan. So far, I can manage a day or two in a row. But never three. So for now, three gets a bonus. I will surely change that later and make the bonus harder to earn, but for now it should be good motivation.

So, there we have it. The longest weight loss journey begins with a single pound, right?

ps. Blogger has been giving me trouble again. I hear around the blogosphere that it's not just me. Lockouts were happening all over the place, including right here chez Knitterary.

She Who Lived

This is one of the gauge swatches for Catherine Parr. I'd show you some of the other gauge swatches, but this yarn -- a deep, heathery pine green Cascade 220 -- tends to photograph as one giant black patch. The above picture is the only one that shows the stitchwork at all, and I had to really monkey with the photo settings to get it to this point.

In real life, this yarn has an almost luminous quality. The green is lush and deep with strong blue undertones. There are hints of deep gold and grey and blue and silvery green in the heathering. Where other knitters may be entranced by the flash and sizzle of a variegated yarn, this yarn exhibits the exact characteristics that make me all swoony over solids. The color is enchanting and subtle and makes me think of standing under the leaf canopy in a dense, quiet summer forest. Maybe I'm just a plain jane, but when a solid is this appealing, I'll take a solid any day.

It seems a fitting yarn for a sweater named after Catherine Parr. Just as the camera treats this yarn as a two-dimensional and textureless, history has dismissed Catherine as "the wife who nursed Henry through his final illness." But there was so much more to her than that. Henry was her third husband, but not her last. My favorite story about her involves her second husband, an aging warrior aristocrat whose lands were in a strategically important stretch of English ground.

As I understand the story, a monk in this neighborhood arranged to have a saint's body exhumed to display the purity of the corpse. At a time when monasteries were being torn down brick by brick to undercut the Catholic church's hold over the people, this bordered on an act of treason. The body was brought out and was described by witnesses to be miraculously preserved and sweet-smelling. People from the area rallied under the saint's banner, and civil war was imminent. Armies were mustered, battles fought. Things looked pretty grim, all because of a saint with a corpse that had not decomposed.

Or had it? Catherine discovered that the body was not that of the saint, but of a village girl who had died quite recently. She found the girl's grieiving mother and brought her to chapel to venerate the "saint." When the mother identified her daughter's body in the saint's place, the rebellion fell apart. Henry later credited Catherine with saving his kingdom. These are not the acts of a mere nursemaid married only to provide fresh bandages during a final illness.

Catherine was a complex woman, beautiful without being dramatic or arrogant, and sometimes overlooked by her peers in favor of ladies with more sparkle or flair. She had a warm and sturdy nature and a quick intellect, and she wasn't afraid to speak up, a fact which almost cost her her life. Yes, that's right, Henry nearly ordered her arrest and death for arguing church doctrine with him. Catherine's enemies used her intellect and her piety against her and accused her of both treason and heresy, but she managed to outwit them and preserve her pretty neck. Smart? Yep. You bet. You have to be pretty smart to outlive a king who thought little of beheading his wives for political gain and who had all but placed the head of his sixth wife on the chopping block.

So, my green yarn may not dazzle, but like Catherine, it's got hidden depths. Look closely, and you might just find that there's more there than you first realized. You might just see the kind of quiet beauty that can outlive a bloodthirsty king.

(st)EEK! It's Scary!

For a long time now, it's bugged me that my colorwork sucks as bad as it does. So many patterns I'd love to knit. Abalone! Roscalie! Henry VIII! Not to mention those gorgeous things Eunny Jang has been designing for IK. But they all require a knitter with better color chops than me.

For most of this year, this hole in my skill set has been on my mind enough for me to have planned a way to get over the hump. Step one involved buying some practice yarn. Yeah, right. Like I couldn't use up some leftover skeins in my stash. I just use any excuse to buy yarn, and needing to improve my colorwork was a perfectly workable excuse. (Past excuses have included things like, I can't remember where I put my ~insert knitting tool here~, and It's cloudy and cold and I need a pick-me-up, and the ever-popular, I've been working too hard and now I deserve a treat. So you see, any excuse with a real project goal attached is a step up from my usual excuses.)

I found some gorgeous variegated wool at, where else, Nana's Knits, and decided to use it against a black background to make a felted fair isle bag. Why felted? Because felting hides a lot of sins, including inconsistent gauge and bubbly fabric. Bless me, father, for I commit these sins on a regular basis.






















The lovely Trish at Nana's was surprised to learn that I have trouble carrying with my left hand. What she doesn't realize is that I'm so strongly right-handed that it's a miracle I can type. And drive. And button my shirts. I had tried and failed to figure out a lefty knitting method that would work for me and feel comfortable. This was really the root of my fair isle failures.

So Trish loaned me these two doohickies. The one on my naughty finger lets you strand two colors over a single finger at once, running one through each of those corkscrewy bits. The red one on my index finger lets you strand up to four colors at once by running a strand through the pegs under the swivelly silver pin.

These are really cool gadgets. I have to say, they worked much better than my former technique of picking up and dropping colors as needed. The fabric evened out almost immediately. I like the red one with the silver arm a little better because the corkscrewy one had a habit of rotating on my finger.

This past summer at Stitches, I took a class on continental knitting in the hopes that it would help my left hand be a little less clumsy. By the end of the class, I could actually work a knit stitch with only minor contortions and minimal bad language. The purl stitch still eludes me, but guess what? Don't need to purl when you're working in the round. Yay for working in the round!

So I pulled out my Stitches notes and switched from the finger contraptions to good old-fashioned two-handed carries. And it was awful at first, but within about two rounds, I discovered that my speed was picking up, and my floats were a bit more even. Don't get me wrong -- I'm not anywhere near where I want to be. Even a casual glance at the picture up top will reveal how uneven my stitches still are. But it's getting better, and my hope is that by the time I get to steek this fabric to stitch the bag together, I might actually be classified a beginner rather than a totally lame wannabe.

The pattern is sort of my own concoction. I'll save that happy little story for another post.

Ball One

This is how far I got on the crapotis over the weekend. I did finish the first ball of Gypsy Girl, as I suspected I would. The scarf measures around 26" along the long edge, maybe a little longer. I used my knitting needles to guesstimate the length, and it's hard to measure while trying to keep the dratted thing from curling itself into a tiny, dense, blue and orange imitation of an onion.

This scarf hates to lay flat. Hates. Like, you know the powerful emotion that overcomes a woman when her husband and the father of her children decides to take up with a 24-year-old pole dancer? That's how this scarf feels when I pull it flat. You can almost see the scarf's thought bubble, which clearly reads, "Keep it up and I will slash your car tires, asshole."

Which is why I mostly leave it alone to curl into itself. I like my tires inflated, thank you very much.

Other than that (ahem), it's a good little scarf. Easy and mindless and quick. I'll have to save some yarn to crochet an edging that might help it stop curling. And blocking should help some.

I've laid it to one side temporarily. Mom is coming to town for a couple weeks, so I'm hiding the scarf to preserve the surprise. Trust me. It's okay. There's no shortage of other stuff to knit chez Knitterary. Especially not after the weekend's stash dive, which resulted in not one but two new projects OTN, one of which is very very scary. :)

The Best Kind of Weekend

It all started innocently enough. I went home from the shop Friday afternoon and told myself I ought to wind a second skein of yarn for Da Bears clapotis.

"Self," sez I, "you're probably going to knock out that first skein of Gypsy Girl this weekend. Might as well haul out the swift and winder and wind off the second skein."

So I did. Easy enough.

Then it occurred to me that I still hadn't wound off any skeins for Catherine Parr, and we're casting on for that some time this month. So I wound one pale green and two hunters to get ready for that. Easy enough.

And then disaster struck.

"Hmm," sez I, "Long as you have this contraption set up, might be worth winding whatever else you need for the month. So ... what else do you need for the month?"














Up came the stash bins from the basement. Out came the stash bins from under the bed. Pretty soon, every table in my house was covered in yarn. Living room floor? Covered. Sofas and coffee tables? Covered. Front hall? Covered, and the piano and piano bench too.

I left pathways through the yarn so I could get to the sink for water. Very important to remain hydrated during a major stash dive. It's a highly aerobic sport, y'all. If you love yarn like I do, all that gasping and swooning burns off major calories.

Want a peek?

















This is one of the basement bins. To the left, three mill packs of merino from Stitches this summer. To the right, Cascade 220 in two shades of blue. The exact origins of this stash enhancement are shrouded by the mists of time. I can report that under the 220 was a massive pile of Torino and some green yarn I forgot I owned. Funny how we forget these things.

It's a short hop from the stash bins to the pattern files. And from there, an even shorter hop to delirium and madness.

I wanted to cast on everything. Right. This. Minute. I started searching for needles, hunting for specific patterns, re-reading pattern books that are already as familiar to me as my own fingernails.

I carried yarn with me from room to room, unwilling to part with a current favorite even long enough to make a peanut butter sandwich.

I wound up with a huge pile of books and pattern files next to the bathtub, because you have to have good reading material while you soak, right? And heaven forbid I should walk away from the stash and all its possibilities even long enough to wash my body.

My house looked like an explosion in a knitting factory. It was awful. And wonderful. And a really great weekend.

Some decisions were made, and sanity eventually returned. (ish) My floors are visible again, and most of the stash bins have been returned to their rightful places. And the consequences of this stash dive and winding marathon will be disclosed as the week unfolds. Stay tuned....

Clap On!

Here's the start of the clapotis out of the Gypsy Girl Scrimmage. This is a very nice sock yarn (200 yds in a 2 oz skein) knit on 4mm needles. The morning light, she was not so kind to the yarn. Makes it look like it has a boucle-ish texture, when really it's very smooth and nice. Maybe next time I'll get better pictures.

This is my first ever clapotis. Not sure what I can add to the already lengthy discussion of this pattern. It's easy. It's sort of fun, though mostly mindless. Dropping the stitches feels naughty and and I get a wicked shiver when I do it. I have a feeling I won't be one of those people who knits this pattern over and over again. It feels like a party trick -- kind of fun, but once you see how it's done, it loses some of its magic.

But it's a good counterpoint to Fulmar. I have to think about Fulmar while I'm knitting it. I have to count stitches and check my crosses and do all those other persnickety things that come with a complex knit.

But the clapotis? Once you get the pattern established, there's nothing to it. It's almost as mindless as plain socks. Great for knitting group, because I can still chat and see what everyone else is knitting. No worries about tracking the pattern.

That's not a diss. Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while know that I like to alternate mindless knitting and harder knits. The clapotis is a good bit of mostly mindless knitting, and I have a feeling the finished scarf is going to rock it hard. I already love the way the fabric is pooling and flashing. I love the way the stripes from the yarn colors are broken up by the perpendicular stripes from the dropped stitches. It has a real Chicago-winter feel to it already -- it's looks rugged, but is both softer and warmer than it looks, and it's in the ubiquitous safety cone orange and navy blue found on so much winter gear around here. Plus the yarn, that Gypsy Girl sock yarn, is lovely to work.

A Milestone Moment

Readership of this blog has been growing pretty steadily from the very first post. Amazing how these things take off. I remember being astonished the first time someone outside my local knitting group posted in the comments, and now I feel like some of the commenters are becoming friends. That's a good feeling, and what a remarkable way to meet new people. All I do is blather on about yarn and knitting, and poof! I have new friends. Gotta love it.

Anyway, you could have knocked me over with a proverbial feather when I got my stats for the week. For the first time ever, this blog logged over 100 hits on a single day. (Those are real hits, too. Not webcrawler hits.) The grand total was 115, a new record. I know that, compared to some blogs, 115 is a weenie little number. But for me? It's shocking and, I must confess, a bit humbling.

Thanks to all of you for reading and participating, for making me laugh with your witty comments, and for sharing your knitting wisdom. Thanks for inviting me to your alongs, and for playing along with mine. Most of all, thanks for making me feel like a part of a real community. Yarny hugs for everyone!

Ouch! My Aching Wallet!

From the top: Austerman Step, Silver Creek Merino in color Iris, Bearfoot in solid-ish burgundy, and Claudia Handpainted in a colorway that ought to be named cloudy skies, because that's what it looks like to me.

We piled into a van and hauled on up to The Fold Saturday because Kris needed more yarn for her Fulmar and I needed dye for Lady Eleanor. I was going to be all good and virtuous and not spend money except for the dye and maybe a little sock yarn. The Fold has such a nice selection of sock yarn, and as we all know, yarn has a tendency to leap of its own accord into my shopping basket and sneak a ride home in the back of my car. This is because yarn love me so much, and how can I deny something that wants to be with me so very much?

Yeah. That's it. That's the reason. Because yarn loves me.

So we walk in, and greet the lovely Toni, and chat a minute. I showed her my Fulmar in progress, and Kris showed hers, because we both bought the yarn there during the infamous spinning wheel trip last spring. The whole time we were talking, I kept glancing over my shoulder at something very, very dangerous.

New yarn.

So much new yarn that she even had a new display rack front and center by the sock yarn.

The others started wandering and browsing, but I stopped cold in front of that new display. Claudia Handpainted, lots of new colors of Step and Trekking, even sock yarn made from alpaca. Things I can't get at home, things I haven't ever seen in person before. At one point, I had about nine skeins of sock yarn clutched to my heaving bosoms.

And then I made the dreadful mistake of walking into the yarn room.

Gasp!

...clutch chest...



















It's so -- so -- so --

PURPLE!

And it's Silver Creek Merino, one of my soopah fave yarns!

I think half the store heard my yarngasmic gasp at the sight of that yarn. Luckily, I've been there before. They know me. They know this is just my charming little way. No need to call the paramedics.

It's just because I'm so overwhelmed by how much the yarn loves me.

So I dithered and fussed over how many skeins to buy. I've never seen that purple before. Toni says she had it, but I beg to differ. There is NO WAY this yarn would not have followed me home had I seen it before, and EVERY TIME we've gone to The Fold, I've ended up standing in front of the Silver Creek shelf, pattern list in one hand, calculator in the other, computing the total damage, muttering, "need it, need it, got it, need it, got it" as I scan the colors.

My theory? When I needed a couple more skeins of the Royal for Fulmar, Toni and/or her son went into their storage room to look for it. She mentioned at the time that she found a big box of it. I think the purple was in that box. Just a theory, because, seriously? This yarn belonged to me from the moment it came out of the mill. We just hadn't found each other yet.

I bought every skein she had -- there are eight -- and will use them to make the Swedish Thora.











Also, here is a better picture of the Bearfoot. This yarn doesn't like to have it's picture taken. It's very shy and tries to blend into the countertop. I had to take a lot of pictures to get this one with the true color showing.

So....

The Fold trip was planned before I made my Skinny-4-Stash goals, and that's probably just as well. I would have owed myself a whole slew of treadmill miles to pay for this yarn! And given that the treadmill at the clubhouse broke last weekend (seriously bad bad timing), I'd probably still be walking off that yarn come January.

No, not really. I'm going to go buy a health club membership this afternoon. Gotta have a treadmill if I want to get Skinny-4-Stash and ever be able to shop again!