Purl, Interrupted

Drinking the Kool-Aid.

I tried to resist this little quiz, but I was sucked in. And, naturally, I had to post the result once I discovered that I am a ... knitting guru!!! (Hah - I wish!!)

You appear to be a Knitting Guru. You love knitting
and do it all the time. While finishing a piece
is the plan, you still love the process, and
can't imagine a day going by without giving
some time to your yarn. Packing for vacation
involves leaving ample space for the stash and
supplies. It can be hard to tell where the yarn
ends and you begin.


What Kind of Knitter Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

tricks & treats

Happy Halloween. I'm happy to report that I'm back in FTP land, so I have pictures of the scarves. First, the red one is done! Although I plan on giving it as an xmas gift, I've been wearing it all week.

Also, I finally went to Yarn! and got more yarn for scarf #2 (the mission falls wool). It's moving along nicely; I knit almost the entire second skein yesterday. Somehow it seemed to take much, much longer when I was working on it on a cross-country plane ride. Go figure. Anyway, here it is:


Snappy, eh?
And while I had the camera (and the pumpkin) out, I took a progress update photo of terry's sweater. I'm more than 1/2 way done on the length, and then have to do the sleeves and the neck. You'll note that it looks nothing like an alpaca sportbra. The little victories.

It's a terrible picture -- the sweater is actually much nicer than this. In fact, I decided I like it enough to make myself a sweater from the same pattern.
Which means I've finally decided what to do with my big gift certificate. I decided to take the plunge and buy
swanky, expensive yarn. I ordered the dark grey. I hope I don't have
the color-card problem that Sarah had, but figure that's less likely since I'm ordering grey, not yellow.

progress!

Terry had a gig on Friday night so I finished the first Irish Hiking Scarf while listening to sea shanties. Seems kind of appropriate. Now it's back to the sweater, which is now 3 or 4 inches past the bottom of the armholes and looks, I'm happy to report, nothing like a sports bra.

It's the little victories that get you through....

irish hiking scarf update

the irish hiking scarf is almost done and now i've been inspired by stephanie from the knit-a-long to make a matching hat when I'm done. (oooh, does that mean ordering a third skein of this color manos? maaaannn!

that's extra lame since when I ordered the yarn to finish this scarf i also ordered enough in different colors for 2 more scarves. (oh yeah did i mention i fell off my yarn diet?) of course, if i want to make hats, i'll need another skein of each one. lame.

anyway, assuming i can track down yarn, i'm going to make
this!

snappy, eh? I guess I'll have to use smaller needles than for the scarf itself, lest I make a hippo-sized hat.

i'm also plugging away at the sweater -- now that the godforsaken shaping is done (at least until i get to the sleeves) i'm averaging about an inch or so a day. which means it should be done by xmas. hooray!

scraping the bottom of the domesticity barrel

This is not about knitting, except that I'd planned on doing a little blogging this a.m. while eating my cereal. I figured it would be a nice way to change my unfortunate new (okay, post-Hayward) habit of spending $4.50 every morning for a latte and a pumpkin scone.

So I poured myself a big bowl o' raisin bran and then went to fridge to get the milk. There were 3 separate cartons of milk in there. Let me interject here that I almost never drink milk, buy Terry has a glass of milk every single night before bed. Which is why I can't believe there are 3 *expired* milk cartons in there. WTF??? (Granted, one wonders why I didn't know this before, but I'm not the one who drinks make every day but just keeps buying new milk without getting rid of the old milk!)

Ah ... living with boys....

I hope they haven't run out of scones by the time I get there.

p.s. the sweater now looks like a sweater and not just an amorphous blob. Yipee! In fact, if T just wanted a midriff exposing alpaca t-shirt, it would be done....

yes, i'm still alive

so i've been a bit of a blog slacker. but not a knitting slacker. the biggest piece of news (if i can risk such a term) is that i've FINALLY gotten to the actual body of the alpaca sweater. what i've been doing up until now is increasing on either side of 4 stitch markers every other row. for about a hundred thousand rows. i finally got to the point where you slip stitches on both sides onto scrap yarn and hold them to make the sleeves later.

now i just have to knit in a circle until the thing is 24 inches long. i think it's about 6 now. ugh.

in other news, i'm almost done with the first cable scarf. it's so nice. now i just have to decide who to give it to.

also, i bought some cashmerino (i know, i shouldn't have, but i'm having a hard time sticking to my yarn diet). anyway, i bought a skein of 'rose' and a skein of 'peach' to make baby hats. i wanted to make the bobbles & cables hat from summer interweave knits, but it was a little bit too hard so i'm just making a simple hat and following the bobbles & cables pattern for decreasing (which tends to be where my free-form hat making runs into trouble).

i would upload pictures of these wonders but my free trial subscription to "cute ftp" has run out, so now i need to find a cheap replacement. any suggestions? (cute ftp was sooo cool, but it's super expensive).

in an unrelated note, it's raining buckets today, which i suspect will mean no mel-o-dee bar for me tonight. :-( i'll be happy if i survive my drive home from hayward.....

cable scarf (scarves) update

so i'm working on 2 different versions of the irish hiking scarf. i've knitted one skein each of the manos and the mission falls wool. an interesting study in contrast, both in terms of how they look and how much length you get out of one skein.

first, here's are close-ups of the cables on each:

now, here's the progress on each:

now here they are side-by-side (but not to scale - the mission falls one is much smaller):

knitting is not the rotator cuff's friend

my physical therapist told me to stop knitting. seems unlikely. but i concede that knitting for 5 hours on a plane = bad for previously torn rotator cuff. in a related story, i skipped tuesday night's knitting circle in favor of sitting around in my flannel pajamas. not that i couldn't have worn them to the mel-o-dee...

never do this

i am such a dumbass. when i bought the manos -- on vacation many hours from my house -- i didn't know what i wanted to make, so i just bought 1 skein. of course, my LYS had assured me that they had every color of manos imaginable, so i figured i could get more there if i wanted to make a biger project. nope. they don't carry lovely color #115. thank god for kaleidoscopeyarns.com....

in a related story -- the scarf is 1/2 finished. pics soon. plus, i started a second one while in philly -- this time in mission falls wool. holy moly does that take a long time (smaller needles suck). plus the skein is only 85 yards (hmm, i only bought one of those, too) (where's my common sense??), so it's about dishtowel size at present. again, pics soon. but it's going to take forever to finish this one.

oh, and i need someone to show me how to make socks.