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.