Thursday, December 20, 2007

"Holidaze"

I know I'm not the first person to use this word to describe the way I feel this season, but, this year, it seems especially appropriate. So far, this year has brought a frenzy of paper-finishing (I don't have a picture of that one, so you'll just have to take my word for it when I tell you it completely consumed my waking hours for a few days), and shopping (again no picture, this time for security reasons, ya know), ...

and baking...
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and decorating...
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and posing...
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and singing...
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and knitting...,
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among many other things. The only thing I really haven't been doing is cleaning, but that's coming up next.

Merry Christmas!

Tuesday, December 04, 2007

Knitting Lessons I Learned Today

1. Knitting socks in church is risky, even when you are not really there on official business, but just waiting for your kids to come out of choir. When you learn the hard way how loud your phone sounds in a church, and suffer the mortification of hearing the ring echo off the wood and marble, you will jump about 5 feet in the air. Just imagine the trajectory of the bamboo dpn flying out of your hands as you scramble for your phone and try to keep from dropping both it and your work in progress. I have to imagine, because I have no idea where it ended up. I was not quite up for crawling under the pews to look for it. Anyone have a spare Crystal Palace No. 2?

2. Vanilla Knitting has its place: Yes, sometimes you want to be challenged. You find yourself craving *yo ssk tbl yo p2tog* repeat, with maybe some short rows thrown in. Just like sometimes you want Chocolate Coffee Chip with a skor bar mix-in. But sometimes just plain ol' garter stitch can be very refreshing. And then there are those days when you just need to cleanse your palate with a basic stockinette sock in self-striping yarn, when the only thing your brain can handle is the basic knit stitch combined with, oh, lookie, the yarn changed color. Shiny!

3. Knitting Inertia is an insidious force: Once you put a project down, the amount of devotion and discipline needed to pick it back up again = the amount of your stash multiplied by the complication factor of the pattern of the hibernating project divided by how well you took notes on that project. It's so much easier to start someting new, isn't it? Sheesh, sometimes I think I would be better off ripping a thing apart and starting over.

Monday, December 03, 2007

Short Attention Span

Yes, I keep casting on. Not so much with the casting off, lately, though. Here is another Multidirectional Diagonal scarf, in a more traditional incarnation. This time I am using Plymouth Boku, a yarn obviously intended as a copy of Noro Silk Garden. It is not very soft, but does look very cool in this pattern which was clearly written for a Noro yarn.
Boku scarf
One sock is done in the Pueblo Charade socks:
Pueblo Charade socks
I also have about half the foot of the second sock done as well, I just didn't take a picture of it.

I decided to try to make a hat. I dug through the stash for a something approriate, found a cool pattern on Ravelry and cast on this:
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Now, of course, I don't like it. It's really, really, really, tedious to do. And it is taking forEVer. I worked on it furiously for a couple evenings, then put it down, and I'm now watching it collect dust. Ick.

I also am on my third try in my quest to find a lace scarf pattern that will work for my Hand Maiden Mini Maiden wool & silk. The dark color, though, is making it difficult. My first try totally crashed and burned. The pattern had a 24-row repeat with every row being different--ssk's, purl 2 togs backwards and yo's on both sides of the work--and it drove me crazy. It was impossible to figure it out without looking at the pattern all the time, and the dark yarn made it hard to see what was going on. After 2 hours I had only 14 rows done and 3 of those contained mistakes that I could not find to fix no matter what I did. I enjoyed ripping it back. For my second try, I found a pattern I really liked and recklessly cast on before I realized that the pattern calls for 950 yards of yarn while my skein only had about 500 yards. So that got frogged too.

Now I'm doing the KnitPicks Candle Flame scarf, and it's OK. At least the rows make sense and are therefore relatively easy to follow:
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Here it is, after one 36-row repeat. It's OK, but I'm not in love.

Now Mom has requested a hat for Christmas, so I figured that should take priority. Unfortunately, she wants it to be powder blue, and I think that may be the only color that I don't have in my stash! Oh, well, guess I have to go to the yarn store! Too bad. :o)