Purl, Interrupted

go east, young girl

so it's off to visit the inlaws for the weekend, and am hoping i don't have any kind of mean-airport-security-person issues vis a vis my knitting. i use circulars and i haven't had a problem yet - i think they look less menacing. but i'm a little worried about the alpaca sweater which is on turbos....

anyway, i'll be off in philadelphia knitting up a storm and trying not to talk politics. knit faster. knit faster. i think i'm going to wish i'd bought a 2nd skein of the manos before i left.... i'm hoping to finish this skein on the scarf over the weekend.

and then i'll have to decide what yarn to use for the next one! (i'm leaning towards rowan polar. but i have a big gift certificate to use up at yarn forward, so i'd rather use something they sell. any suggestions??)

why does e-blogger hate me?

so i have several knitting friends whose blogs are run through e-blogger, and to post a comment you have to register with them. i registered, but whenever i try to sign in it just sends me back into a "sign in" loop. e.g. you enter your info and the next screen you get asks you for the same info. again and again. which is why i can't post anything on the irish hiking scarf knit-a-long. :-(

speaking of which, however, the scarf is coming along nicely. i think i made a couple of very minor mistakes early on but nothing that merits tearing it out. the manos looks dreamy. i think i'll make the same scarf in another yarn when i'm done. hmmm. rowan polar maybe?

knit-a-long!

I've finally figured out what to do with the manos! I've joined the Irish hiking scarf knit-a-long! As an added bonus, this also means I get to play with cables. I started this morning -- i was so excited about it that i got up early to knit before work! so i'm a bit of a dork, but anyway..... Here it is so far:

UFOs

i started this when we found out our friends steve & veronica were having a baby. it was (as if you can't tell) my first attempt at intarsia. i also learned - the hard way - about reading patterns and about little details the good people at wee knits too left out. anyway, i put it down awhile ago. pretty adorable, no? i'd better get back to it sometime before ... december 11!

speaking of things that need to be done by december, here is the alpaca sweater. it's a terrible picture b/c the sweater is knit in the round from the top down, and i'm still on the part where you're increasing before dividing off for the sleeves. so it looks very blobby. but in setting up the picture i was relieved to see that it has gotten much bigger than its fraternal twin -- the alpaca sports bra.

hat pictures!

i went on a little camera binge tonight. here are the 2 latest hats. incidentally, i think i'm off hats for awhile. (as if this weren't obvious), i've been making them sans pattern, and i suspect that i've been over-estimating my abilities in that regard. anyway, here they are:




i actually used the S&B cold blocking method for the first time with the black hat and was amazed at how much more "shaped" it got. (too bad it still looks like it was made by a small child....)

why i want an alpaca

as if i need a reason. as if you didn't want one too.

i'm so excited because deepcolor studios" in kensington is having a spinning/felting open house on saturday. talk about serendipity! Here's their description: "FREE! FELTING AND SPINNING OPEN HOUSE. Felt flowers and beads; try handspinning; home made cookies; all felting stuff on sale. Saturday, September 25. 11 am - 4 pm" Of course, T and I are going to the giants game at 1:05, so I'll be at deep color the second they open. hmmm, maybe the cookies will be warm then, too... ;-)

Speaking of felting, DIY Network has a (relatively) new knitting show from the good people at interweave knits. I think they're running reruns from this summer (aka Season One), and there's one coming up on ... Felting. The details: Felting with Beverly Galeskas, author of Felted Knits. The problem with the show in general is that it's always on at ridiculuous times like 8:30 Friday morning. (note to self: obtain Tivo). But they're showing the felting show on Saturday 10/9 (1:30 p.m. Pacific) and again on Monday the 11th at 7:30 pm. Boy am i excited. So long pillowcase-sized hat -- hello normal hat!!

Incidentally, the ladies o' the mel-o-dee have all these nutty ideas like "felting a swatch first." I guess this is why they went to science school and i went to law school....

i fought the wall and the wall won

So this is only tangentially related to knitting. I fell off a wall last night. Some might say, Terry dropped me after telling me to jump from the wall, but let's not bicker about who broke whose foot.... I went from standing on a wall to lying on the sand in front of it. It was horrific. I was sure I wasn't going to be able to stand up. The whole thing was completely sucky -- it was the middle of the night and we were camping in mendocino, so I had to (1) limp back to the tent and (2) sleep in the tent with my stupid foot all ace-bandaged up and hurting muchly. Anyway, It doesn't appear to be broken, just spectacularly swolen and multicolored.

The knitting related part of this story is this: As I lay in the sand right after falling and in a ton of pain, 100% sure that my ankle was broken, I had the dorkiest thought ever: at least it's not my wrist, so I can still knit. Loser.

a club of one

t and i spent the weekend in mendocino, on the annual camping trip for the bay area sea kayakers ("BASK") club. in my case, BASK stands for bay area snappy knitters. or is it ... stranded knitters?

i love the mendo weekend b/c i get to hang out and knit in snappy cafes (like headwaters in fort bragg). all the kayakers think i'm crazy. which is a little ironic since i'm not the one having near death experiences. (although see other post re: weekend). in any event, i'm not actively seeking out danger. which is good, b/c it seems to find me....

the highlight of the weekend, knitting wise, is that several of the friendlier kayakers asked me to make them hats. (my general policy is that if you bring me the yarn, i will make you a hat).

i also discovered, happily, the there is a lovely yarn store in ft bragg. i bought a skein of black cascade superwash wool to use in my hat-a-thon, b/c i think the rowan kidsilk works better when DK with something else. i also bought a skein of manos in color #115. it's the dreamy mutli-colored wine/ruby one. so nice. so nice in fact that i can't decide what to do with it. i started a hat, then took it apart and started a scarf. then thought abt adding cables, but quickly discovered that i don't actually know how to cable, so I took the scarf out.

in the meantime, i'm going to try a felting experiment with the very first hat, which has taken on a life of its own and needs to be returned to its natural size....

more hats

i'm having hat overload. i made a green & black one for my friend vicky with the green rowan yarn she's been coveting. so i it in the car en route to mendocino on friday.

i had decided to make the green hat smaller than the ones i've been making because they all seem too big. but when i finished this one and tried it on it didn't feel right. the length is right, but it doesn't feel very grabby around your head.

i wasn't very happy with it but wore it a few times and got several complements.

i think i need a new base-line pattern. (i've just been CO-ing around 70 stiches and knitting til it looks like a hat and then decreasing to shape it. maybe i need a little more structure in my life).

and yes, if i give you a hat, i've worn it. it's like taste-testing.... :-)

Knit Lit!

Newsflash! The folks from Knit Lit are accepting submissions for a third volume of their book. I wrote a little something inspired by the Tuesday Night Knitting Circle. It's called "Stop Looking at My Booty." Submissions are due by 10/1/04.

overwhelmed

i have too much yarn. specifically, too many random skeins of great rowan wool & kid-silk -- not enough of any color to make anything big. i'm trying to figure out what to do with it all. stripey hats for everyone!!

i'm just overwhelmed by all the potential color combos.... there are lots of great neutral colors (black, browns, greys) but also some very bright colors that aren't usually in my repetroire. (neon pink, for example). so i'm trying to figure out how to optimize my use of the neutral colors with the bright colors (which i will otherwise never use).

but it's like some kind of bad logic problem. and who needs GRE/LSAT flashbacks?

yo soy hat-making machine

hoo boy. what a productive weekend. or crazy? so nice to kick back in coffee for thought and knit hats and talk to neat people. This weekend was all about the hats. I finished the stripey one last night, and got about 1 inch into a second one -- black this time. I finished that today. It's black 4 x 2 rib with 2 thick grey/khaki stripes. It's double knit with Rowan designer DK wool and Rowan "Kaffe Fassett's Kid/Silk (70% Kid Mohair/30 % Mulberry silk). Very soft & warm. Perfect for the skiing siblings in my life, perhaps??

I suppose I shouldn't start anything else right away, since it's about 10:30 at night and I should be shuffinlig off to bed. Besides, I need to get Terry's alpaca sweater past the tricky part before I forget how to do it and wind up with another freaky mess.....

one hat down -- 8 billion to go...

I finished the stripey hat, and managed to rescue it from its scary 70's beginnings. Here it is:


Here's a close-up:

I also updated my finished projects gallery, which is especially sporty with new pictures of Terry modelling the various hats in "hip mountaineer" mode. (We don't get out much).

it begins.

boy am i excited to enter the wonderful world of knitting blogs! this all came about because i desperately need someway of cataloging my various knitting missteps, misadventures and, occasionally, finished projects. so ... here goes.

projects currently in the works:
(1) alpaca sweater for terry (ak.a. the sweater briefly and unfortunately known as the alpaca sportsbra).
(2) black tank top from summer issue of interweave knits.
(3) baby blanket for indiana schmidt (from wee knits too; presently on hold while I recover from learning intarsia the hard way).
(4) wool hat #1 with some of the great stash of old rowan wool my mom found. there's all this great yarn, but mostly in 1 or 2 skeins/color. i think this is hat going to be striped. i'm doubleknitting with 2 complementary burgundy shades; i think i'll switch to something else in a few inches. i had this idea that i was going to make all these friends hats for xmas, so i decided it was time to start ... making hats!

things i want to try: cables. felting. socks. the cardigan in hip-to-knit (with manos). everything in interweave knits.

things i've made so far: stripey soft wool hat (rowan polar), huge red scarf with rowan big wool (my first ever project, although the hat got finished first), my first sweater -- a kiwi green version of the "1st sweater" in hip-to-knit (in rowan polar, of course), the peruvian baby hat for the half-peruvian baby (from wee knits too), and fraternal twin baby hats for fraternal twin babies (devon & sebastian bush).