Party Socks and Knitty Surprises February 3, 2009

On January 10, my knit group did this “Party Socks” swap, where you bring in a 100g ball of yarn, and leave with 100g of sock yarn.  While a fun idea, everyone has since agreed that next time we’ll do a themed swap, where the yarn you get looks like… something.

Here’s the artistic shot:

And hold onto your breakfast, because here’s the full shot, on the sock blockers, with the last color turned down because they’re too tall for the sock blockers.

Mine are the first finished pair of socks. Lyn made an awesome bag out of her yarn, a couple people are knitting their socks, and some haven’t even started, not figuring what they want to do with the ends yet. I did the ‘weave in as you go’ method, with one russian join in the heel section. 3 weeks of knitting, and they’re done. More info on my rav page for this project. I’m thinking as a teaching tool, as a ‘this is how much yarn one needs to make socks of this height’, it wasn’t such a bad project. I just got stuck in some of the colors for longer than I thought necessary.

After finishing the party socks, the Knitty Surprises were posted. There was a coat, a funky hat, and a heart. I think I might knit the funky hat at some point, but I thought the heart was really kinda cute. So yesterday, I sat down and knit one.

I kinda messed up the first ‘valve’ — it’s supposed to be taller by 4 rows, but if you didn’t know that the pattern was supposed to be a little taller, you’d never see it. Back view (or is it front?) on its own rav page. I had a hard time naming it. “Ya gotta have heart”? “I left my heart in San Francisco”? I settled on “Why I Aorta”. It makes me giggle. The red and orange is handspun that’s been sitting around for a while, and the red is Cascade 220 Heathers. I stuffed it with some of the ‘beginnner roving’, carded & pin-drafted mystery wool.

The kind of weird thing about the heart is that I got row gauge without even really trying. I didn’t measure my stitch gauge, but there are several parts where you’re supposed to knit for X inches, and I based that on the number of rows in the given row gauge. When I measured, I was spot on. I thought it was rather strange, given that the yarn requested was sock weight on 1′s, and I was using worsted on 3′s, but it wasn’t until almost the end of the project that I figured that out, so I was somewhat pleased and a little weirded out.

I’m currently knitting a hat with the leftovers, but I don’t have a link for that yet. It’s a surprise.

Happy Almost New Year… December 31, 2007

I figured if I was going to get one last post in this year, I’d have to hurry. 

Christmas was a madhouse. Imagine, a household with 2 people, 2 cats, and one dog exploding into a house full of 8 people, 2 cats, and 3 dogs. And one of those was my mother (as well as being the mother of 4 of the other visitors). I finished the stockings, just barely, with the help of my husband (who knit about 2″ on the top of the leg and the lip of one sock) and my sister-in-law (who knit 2″ on one sock, then its lip, and about 8 purl rounds on the other). No photos, as the stockings have all been appropriated. 

We had fun, don’t let me fool you. We played on the wii until our arms fell off. We visited the Celestial Seasonings factory, and did the tour. We all got and gave cool gifts (I gave some handspun alpaca to my alpaca-obsessed sister-in-law), and had a good time. It was just stressful. Mostly because mom… well… sigh. To start with, she wasn’t pleased with our tree once we put all of our ornaments on. We ended up going to JoAnn, where she bought some sort of gold and green and red garland, some plastic balls, and some twisty thingies to add to the tree. The twisty things will get packed. The garland and cheap plastic ornaments got tossed. (We had about 4 boxes of glass ornaments on the tree, btw. And our normal assortment of weird things, and a garland, and lights. It wasn’t bare. It was fine.) 

To continue the mom weirdness, she complained about being ‘nauseous’ and ‘not feeling well.’ I’m 99% sure this is because she wasn’t drinking enough water. I live at an altitude of 6700 feet. She lives pretty much at sea level, being less than 3 miles from the sea. I gave everyone a refillable water bottle, but she never touched hers. Because, I quote, “flat water makes me nauseous.” Yeah, my head almost exploded, and I started thinking about the Louis Black bit about “if it wasn’t for my horse…” She woke me up the day after she got in at 8am, asking for breakfast, and then proceeded not to eat any of it. In fact, she didn’t eat anything I made until Christmas Day, when I made a pot roast. We *did* have Chick-Fil-A once or twice while she was here, as we’re from the South, and there are none in Maine, where she lives, or NYC where my brother and his wife live.

On the knitting front with mom, I taught mom how to cable (and wrote her a simple pattern with two C4F’s) and how to kfb. Yes, I taught mom how to increase. She already knew k2tog, and I got her started on a garter-stitch diagonal scarf thingy. I wrote her a pattern out for that one, too, on the back of some envelope or another. We went on a mini-crawl and visited the Llama store, Green Valley, and Needleworks. We stopped off on the way back from old Colorado City at Sparrow Hawk, the kitchen store downtown, and it was awesome. This was also the trip we made to JoAnn, and I want to say we stopped off somewhere else as well, but I can’t remember. It’s all still a blur.

It was a lot of fun, but I’m looking forward to next year when it will be me, Ben, the dog, and the cats. And maybe some friends if we’re up to it. No flying, no schedules, no dog fights (yelling, mostly, not actual fights with teeth and blood), no driving to the airport at 4am, etc.

On the fibery front, I entered a swap on Craftster to make Art Yarn, something which I don’t normally do. I received a box of treasures from my partner:

and it looked like this once I removed the gorgeous batts: 

Here it is on the bobbin — MJ, do you have a proper photo of it all skeined up and fluffy? It has big glass beads in it, curlicues of locks trapped in the plied yarn (which was plied around a core of crochet cotton in green), and coils, where I let the spun yarn ply loosely around the core of crochet cotton and then smushed it together.

 

It turned out awesome, but I didn’t know what I would ever knit with it. So I brought it to KnitGroup, and sold it to MJ, who had fallen in love with it at first sight.

Because the idea of knitting more socks right now is thoroughly unappealing, I’ve started a 4″ square project. I’ve been knitting 4″ squares (corner to corner, in garter stitch) and crocheting them together. I don’t believe in making new years’ resolutions, as I think that people should set and work for goals all year round, so I’ve got nothing on my slate pertaining to that. I just wish everyone good health and good luck in the coming year.

I think I’m finally rested enough… November 1, 2007

to blog.

On Saturday, there were 10 girls from knit group in my house, dyeing yarn. It was DYE DAY! I don’t think I’ve ever been so exhausted in recent history. MJ has some details on her blog, as I didn’t have the wits about me to bring the camera out. Let’s just say lots of yarn was dyed, and the new dye studio (pics forthcoming — I took some today, but forgot the flash and… sigh…) worked out rather well. There were generally 2, sometimes 3 women dyeing at a time. No one ran out of plastic wrap, and everyone left with some really cool looking yarn.

It was a fun time, and left me tired, but happy. I hope we can do this again, sometime after the holidays, of course. I’ll remember to take the day off before dye day to minimize the sleep deprivation next time. (I work nights, dye day started at 10am.)

I swore I wasn’t going to dye until Tuesday, but I dyed on Monday, and posted some cute new things to Etsy. (More below the jump,  but skip if you don’t like color, or  happen to be  on a yarn diet.)

Cast-on Party! January 14, 2007

I started on the Knit Picks Palette Fair Isle Cardigan last night, joining the ribbing after 2 rows knit ‘flat’. I know, it looks like a lot of nothing, but it gets better, really.

This is about as far as I got with it before I went to knit group (which Lisa graciously held this morning).

When I got there, Sabine tried on Ellen’s Noro sweater, it’s the 48″ version, which Sabine thought she’d like the size of…

But it’s almost a dress on her! She decided to rip out her sweater front (which was about 6″ long, and wrapped almost all the way around her), and to knit a smaller size after trying the sweater on.

Liesel showed off her (pre-felted) bag that she knitted in Patons SWS. We’re waiting for the final result… it’s gotta be fabulous! (That’s MJ, Sabine, part of Ellen’s head, and Jake, the large dog-rug on the floor, looking on with pride.)

Anne finally successfully joined her ribbing in the round around 5pm, 7 hours from the beginning of the knit group today. She cast on, ripped, re-cast on, re-calcuated, and finally joined this sweater in the round.

And my final sweater…