Couldn't find a soaker pattern I loved, so I'm faking it. So far, it seems to be working. I'm extra proud of making the eyelets in the middle of the ribbing. Everyone else probably knows how to do things like that, but I had to work a bit to figure it out.



Think those needles would glow in the dark? The two colorful little skeins are what used to be Branching Out before I frogged it and got out the food coloring. If things work out the way I hope they will, they're going to be bookmarks one of these days.

It's been a good day. I made it to the Aurora Colony Handspinner's Guild Fiber Fair, and the kids let me sit through two of the three demos I really wanted to see. I'm still as confused as ever by how shadow knitting works, but now I've seen first hand how neat it looks. Wonder if I could put one of those SNB aliens on the front of a baby sweater? The talk on Exploring Color Relationships of Dyed Roving to Spun Yarn was incredible. The speaker showed samples of dyed roving, yarn spun from the roving, and swatches knit from the yarn. And some honeycomb pattern hats in different colors that showed how different the variegated yarn looked when paired with different solids. A lot of it went over my head, but I still know more than I did yesterday. I wanted to stick around for the talk on picking out fleeces, but decided it wasn't safe to push my luck with the boys.

Yesterday was kind of mediocre. I got in a lot more knitting time than I expected, because I was stuck at home without a car. Someone smashed the side window of the Tercel. They didn't even get inside -- either that, or they didn't take anything and locked the door behind them, which I kind of doubt. So instead going to the used curriculum sale and physical therapy and the grocery store, I cleaned house and knitted on Quinn's diaper soaker and a square for the blanket the Knittingparents list is making.

Right before bed, I was reading Knitter's Almanac because I thought the part about baby leggings might help me figure out what to do with the crotch of the soaker. The leggings made my head spin the same way it did the first time I read through the book, but the Pi Shawl makes sense. I need to knit one. Now.

Branching Out is no longer on my needles. I tried to do another repeat, wound up with the wrong number of stitches, tinked back two rows and still couldn't find the mistake. Since I wasn't loving the yarn or the way it felt, and probably never would have worn the scarf if I finished it, I unraveled the whole thing and have new plans to see what happens when you mix food coloring and alpaca and try to knit it into bookmarks. A more reasonable knitter might've tried a bit harder to salvage it, but a more reasonable knitter would've been sure to pick yarn she loved instead of picking the stuff that had been sitting in plain sight the longest.

Baby Socks!

The new Interweave Knits has baby socks....cabled baby socks...drop all the other WIPs and cast on for these baby socks. Braided Cable and Hugs and Kisses are my favorites, followed by cable rib and the other two. These could be just the motivation I need to learn how to read cable charts. I desperately want to knit cables from charts, because that's the only way I'm going to get a Rogue or the Heirloom Aran baby sweater, but they scare me and I keep putting it off. These look like a great learning experience. Do I have yarn for these?

I'm also tempted by the sketch book cover, the little socks, the lacy kerchief scarf (think I've got yarn for that one), and the Buffalo Girl neckwarmer and wristlets. Wonder how much buffalo costs.... Yup, it's out of my price range.

At karate yesterday, I swatched for my baby soaker, cast on the right number of stitches, and managed half a row before Quinn decided he wasn't going to sit still long enough for me to knit him a soaker. So we walked down to the grocery store and got a bunch of packets of tangerine KoolAid which they had on clearance -- which is really a good thing, because I want tangerine dyed socks and haven't seen that flavor anyplace else. And I've managed another fifteen rows of Clapotis. Nothing exciting enough to take a picture of.

pawing through my stash

Quinn, who keeps leaking all over me, and Nick, who has a great website that explains all about diaper soakers and how to actually use the things have just about convinced me to try cloth diapering again. The only thing I'm missing is the perfect wool. Should've bought some when I was standing in the Mill End Store with a 25% off coupon, or when I placed my Knitpicks order a couple of days ago, but I was trying to be good and didn't know I had an actual reason to buy those pretty colors.

Instead of buying new wool, I could use the stuff I bought for Bill's socks (bad idea, because then I've lost the possibility of making him socks) or the Fisherman Wool I haven't dyed yet (good idea, because then I can get more tangerine and mango Kool Aid and dye the soaker!) or the green stuff that's sitting in my lap (iffy idea, because I don't know how much of it there is.)

While I was ransacking the visible portion of my stash, I found yarn that might work for Ruffles from Scarf Style, and two skeins of yarn that will work for a pair of slippers I want to make my grandfather -- they're different dye lots, but if I use one skein for each slipper, who's going to know? And since the baby's outgrowing most of his hats (at least the ones I haven't misplaced), I want to knit one of these. There's gotta be the perfect baby hat yarn here someplace...

I've been productive, too. A bunch of quilt squares and six rows of Clapotis, which is suddenly the slowest thing I've knit since Knot a Knitted Paper Bag.

Horror Movie Knitting

Scary movies can add a great deal to the knitting experience. I cast on for Branching Out last night just as Dawn of the Dead came on. Probably not the smartest thing I could have done, since I've already spent several nights lying awake and thinking about disturbing scenes from that movie.

Slipping stitches and knitting two stitches together and passing the slipped stitch over and then trying to figure out which row you're on it much more exciting when there's music getting louder and more ominous by the second and there's something on the screen that needs looking at, but if you look up and lose what little concentration you have, there's no chance of making it to the end of the same row you started...

Wonder what else has good knitting music?

Not knitting is fine, as long as it's because you're doing something that's more fun than knitting, or something that'll make it possible to knit without guilt later on. I'm not sure what's filling up my time lately -- but it isn't knitting, isn't making time for knitting, and not enough of it is more fun than knitting. Since the guild meeting two weeks ago, I've only managed a few rows on my Clapotis, and a pair of socks. Which sounds more productive than it was, since I knit the socks from start to finish in about 2 1/2 days.(I also cut and pieced four quilt squares, but that doesn't even sound like much.)

I've got yarn, patterns, time.... there's no reason I shouldn't be doing something wonderful with it. So here goes:



This will hopefully grow into Branching Out.



This stuff -- Joann's Sensations Rainbow Boucle -- will be either a sweater for Heath or a poncho for Quinn now that I've talked myself out of trying to use it for the hoodie from Knit One. The yarn itself seems okay, and is incredibly cheap, but I'm not in love with the color and don't have the slightest idea how the colors are going to look once it's knitted up into something bigger than my already huge gauge swatch.


And this stuff, which I've been wanting for ages, is going to be something baby sized with lots of wonderful cables and texture that didn't show up in a photo of a photo.

I'm trying very hard not let myself get distracted by the fact that I don't seem to own the right yarn for any of the patterns calling to me from Scarf Style.

Some days, it's easy to be happy. Just look at what I've got next to me while I write this in the front seat of my car and my little girl learns new ways to kick people and keep them from kicking her:



The box itself is pretty exciting. I've still got visions of endless knitted bags, but for sitting and knitting in the car, this works a lot better. No more needles getting caught in something else and sliding loose from the stitches.

There's my springy Clapotis, which has been a bit neglected lately because I've been learning how to work a short row heel and wrap the stitches.

Do you see the socks? I'm just a few rounds of k2p2 ribbing away from a real, functional pair that fits my son's feet. Suddenly a lot more of what I've been reading on Socknitters over the past couple of years makes sense, and I'm not nearly as intimidated by my pretty skeins of Opal. And I've got an actual reason to buy more self patterning yarn because I CAN KNIT SOCKS!

I'd have finished them and restarted my Lolita Toes if it wasn't for the new book. I've been trying to get my hands on a copy of At Knit's End since the day it came out and now that I've finally got one, I can't get over how cute it is. Smaller than I expected, a great size for toting around from room to room. I've seen the cover art dozens of times but I never realized that it was a knitted road stretching toward a big sunny ball of yarn there on the horizon. What a great image! (That title sounds a bit ominous though, like the knitting might someday stop.)

I've only read the introduction and a few pages from the middle -- just enough to convince myself it's as much fun as I'd hoped it would be -- because I hate to use it all up. For a crazy moment, I even considered rationing it out, reading one page each time I finished a new projects, but that's just an insane idea.

I even had a good parking spot right in front of the door, so I could watch class through the window.

Here's the plan for tomorrow:

My Head's Spinning!

I think I overdosed on inspirational fibery stuff this week. Between the quilt show, the knitting guild meeting, going through a bunch of quilting books with my mom, & the new issue of Knitty, I'm a little overwhelmed. There's another quilt show next weekend, and two fiber festivals within the next month, and then I think Sheep to Shawl and Black Sheep Gathering are both June... I could keep hauling the kids to this stuff all summer!

And, as if that wasn't enough, thanks to a lot of very kind advice from members of the Socknitters list, I actually learned to work a short row heel!

This fits my foot:



I'll be ripping the whole thing out soon to make it a bit narrower in hopes that I really can get a pair of Lolita Toes out of one ball of Fixation. But that's okay because it fits, and I understand how to make another one that fits even better.

And because I need some instant gratification before I start the ripping, I started this:

I did cast on something new -- Lolita Toes -- and now the suspense is killing me. Can I do this? If I can, will they fit? If they fit, will there be enough yarn?! I'm using cascade fixation I originally bought with a baby hat in mind, so I've only got one skein. Which is what the pattern calls for, so I should be okay...right? (I tried to do a google search to see if any other knitters had blogged about them, but the results were really really scary.)

My toe is...um...not quite right, because I tried to do the figure eight cast-on from memory, but if I'd hauled my butt off of the couch and logged back onto the internet to find out how to do it right, I probably never would've started the project at all. And what I've got seems to be holding together well enough.

And now I understand where to put the increases if I ever finish my toe up Magic Stripes sock and need to make a second one! That alone is such a wonderful thing that it doesn't matter if my Lolita Toes turn out to be a total disaster. Although I'd really rather have enough yarn and make cute socks that fit my feet.

slipping from room to room in the dark

The Fly Lady says to hit the ground running, and so does The Organizer Lady. If I'm going to be up this early, I'm going to be a quiet little mouse. Not taking a shower or running the vacuum cleaner, or anything else that might inspire the three kids to hit the ground running with me. So I slip from room to room in the dark because it's still cold and dark and I want to get in some knitting time before anyone joins me. I haven't decided if it'll be Clapotis or something else.

I should get off the computer and go cast on something new while they're all sleeping and I've got the chance to actually count.

Flashing My Stash!

It's a few hours early, but I decided to do this while I have time and before I lose my nerve:




Except for a few stray skeins that've surfaced since I took the pictures (and the cross-stitching and quilting stuff), that is absolutely all of my yarn and fiber. It doesn't look as bad as I thought it would, probably because I didn't take everything out of the drawers and spread it out at one time like I did a few months back. And I didn't count skeins or make any other effort to calculate exactly how much yarn is in those piles. It's more than the 320 skeins I had in December.

If you fix a mistake, make sure it's fixed before you knit much further. One of the ladders on my Clapotis got shifted two stitches to one side and made a total mess of things, but I didn't notice it for an entire day of knitting. I wound up frogging the entire thing. There were a bunch of other little problems I'd glossed over along the way, so the new incarnation will be much better than the original.

This is my first project with dropped stitches, and I'm surprised at how much I like the way it looks. I wanted to post a picture of the nice springy colors, but now there's not much to take a picture of. And I was afraid if I took a picture before I tore it all out, I'd lose my nerve and either keep knitting on what I had even though it was doomed, or never start a second attempt.

I've been using every stitch maker I can get my hands on, and I've developed some definite preferences over the past three days. The little round white plastic thingies are best, but I don't have enough and I don't have the energy to drag all three kids to the store for more as long as there's something else in the house that will work. The split markers are too clunky. The little hair elastics, which I've used happily on other projects, get stuck on the cable of my needle and drive me nuts. Little loops of scrap yarn are a pain to cut and tie, but work almost as well as the white plastic things. And they don't cost anything.

Just a Couple More Hours....

I got out of bed sometime before 3am, and it's finally hit me how tired I am. I did try to go back to sleep once I got the baby settled again, but I kept thinking about roving and fleece and yarn and all of the fun things I could be working on, so I just got up and got on with my day. Which has been pretty good, especially since I'm running on about three hours of sleep.

I ran a couple of errands and got a good workout while drooling over an old issue of Vogue Knitting which has a neat backpack that I think might use up some of the bulky brown yarn that's hiding in the bottom of a rubbermaid bin because I don't like the color for a sweater or an afghan and couldn't figure out what else to do with it.

Somehow, a Clapotis jumped onto my needles while I wasn't paying attention. I sort of know how it happened. Alex announced that she wanted a thing that would wrap around her shoulders "just like this," and at about the same time some garage sale yarn that's been sitting in my stash for two years telling me it wanted to be a mobius vest announced that it wanted to be a Clapotis, and by that point it didn't matter that Alex doesn't like my yarn and would rather have the stuff in the pattern picture because now I'm knitting it for myself.

Now that I've found a fun project I got more knitting done today than I have in the past week. And last night, I sat up late playing with the hand carders I got for Christmas. I'd be doing that again tonight, if I wasn't starting to fall asleep here at the computer.

Dinner's in the oven, the baby's been up for hours, and the big kids will go to bed when I tell 'em to. And the Clapotis and fleece will be waiting for me bright and early tomorrow morning.

Birthday Fiber

My husband didn't get me anything for my birthday yesterday. (And we didn't go anywhere because I took the kids to a rainy Easter egg hunt instead.) Supposedly because I didn't tell him what I wanted, but that was only because I was expecting him to ask the way he has for the past couple of years and assuming that since he hadn't asked, he'd figured out an idea of his own. But he didn't do either and I was pouting because if he's not going to buy me birthday yarn, I should at least get SOMETHING! We did go to Borders after dinner to look for The Opinionated Knitter or the Yarn Harlot's book, and they didn't have either, and my parents are in Arizona, so I didn't get anything except a card from Alex and some pretty roving that she bought me on the yarn crawl and gave to me that same day because she couldn't stand waiting. It's GORGEOUS roving, made even gorgeouser by the fact that my 8 year old picked it out and bought it all on her own (and kept half for herself ), but it doesn't quite eclipse the fact that he didn't buy me anything but dinner. I'm going to go ahead and order the Opinionated Knitter from Knitpicks (because that way I can also get the pattern for the smoke ring that none of the LYS's I've checked carry and yarn for it and a couple of other little things...) but I wanted something to play with yesterday, especially since I'd had that something in my hands on the yarn crawl and didn't buy it then.

Then I got this from a wonderfully generous knitting friend (which has nothing to do with my birthday, but was pretty neat timing):

Hi, Michelle and Alex;
I've started my spring cleaning and realized I have several boxes of washed fleece stored in the garage and the shed. If the wool is still in good condition, would you two like to have several boxes of it to spin?

We came home from her house with an entire raw fleece, a paper grocery sack of llama, another grocery sack of kid mohair, a box of something else, a bag of something else, two more bags of carded roving, several skeins of handspun... Just a completely unbelievable amount of fiber! Which she told us to use or trash or do whatever we wanted with.

I've had some roving to play with, but I'm afraid that I'll make a mistake and ruin it, or do things right and use it all up. This just materialized and there's so MUCH of it! I can't wait to play. :-)



I should've played this afternoon, but I was cleaning house and taking pictures so I can Flash my Stash on April 1.

I should get a gold star

I was an extra good mommy today and took the kids to see Robots (which was lots better than the commercials had me expecting it to be, but nowhere near as good as Shrek 2), then to Coldstone Creamery to get free ice cream with the ticket stubs. I didn't get ice cream because I was thinking of how much yarn I could buy for the price of a small bowl. After karate, we spent almost two hours at the library playing in the discovery room, which is set up like a grocery store. No wonder I'm too tired to knit tonight!

I can't even work up the energy to look through the knitting books I brought home. And I can't go to bed until it's time to take my dumb antibiotics.

All the other knitters are knitting bunnies

That's the way the Bunny A Long makes it seem. Easter is coming and I had a partial skein of grey yarn, so it was the perfect time to try the Knitted Bunny pattern at HeartStrings FiberArts.



Isn't he kinda cute? Not as adorable as the one on the pattern and the ones everyone else is making, and not cute enough for me to make two more so all three kids would have bunnies for Easter. But cute enough. Once I got the square knitted, which somehow took days, he finished up quickly.



I think the orange socks are very cute, especially since I made them that color myself by knitting a swatch and then dying it was mango and tangerine KoolAid and frogging it and then knitting socks. I'd like a pair for myself, almost enough to consider repeating the whole process with a lot more wool.

And Alex wants a suede hat in her size.

When do I get to knit?

I managed to finish the suede baby hat in time to take it to the guild meeting last Saturday and made a pair of tube socks for Quinn out of the orange Kool aid yarn, but that's it. The Raspberry Wrap is no more, after someone upended my knitting bag and it got snagged on something else and lots of stitches (including yarn overs which I don't know how to recover) fell of the needles and now I can't even tell which way I was supposed to be going. Maybe I'll try a different ribbing pattern, since I wasn't wild about this one.

I've stumbled onto the ultimate weight loss secret -- the Patternworks catalog! I propped it over the console of the eliptical tonight and, instead of spending the next twenty minutes staring at the timer and wondering when I could get off the thing and go home, I stared at pictures of gorgeous yarn with names like Beach Glass and Love Potion. The time flew, even though I think the thing was set to a harder level than I'm used to (gotta flag down one of the physical therapists and figure out what it should be set at and how to get it that way) and I'd already flipped through most of the catalog. I feel so good! My next challenge is getting myself on enough yarn catalogs to keep my imagination fired up three times a week. Let's see....I've got Woodland Woolworks, Halycon, Knit Picks.... Wonder who else I can request them from.

And, speaking of the wonderful stuff in Patternworks -- there's a jacket that goes with the suede hat and booties. Now I REALLY wish I'd bought more of the suede when it was on clearance!

Should've bought some of the red and black suede...

Berroco Suede is fun to knit with. It feels neat and looks neat and I'm going to be sad when mine is all used up, even though I don't have any idea what I'd do with it beside the Ugg booties and matching hat that I bought it for in the first place.



The hat's almost done except for the flaps and finishing, which made no sense at all when I was trying to figure it out at 1am. I should give it another try tonight so I can free up that set of needles for the next project I want to tackle.

Okay, one of the dozen or so "next projects!" It's a good thing to have patterns and yarn and ideas for more things than I ever expect to finish. Especially when it's nice, cooperative yarn, that doesn't mind what it winds ending up as.

That yarn I bought for the Tri-Aran-Angle? Now it's thinking of becoming a Raspberry Wrap. I've got my measurements. I've got Barbara Walker's Treasury of Knitting Patterns from the library so I can look up the ribbing in the middle. Now I've got to swatch and do math and that's where I always go astray and look for the easy way out.

Besotted is all done, and I need another big rectangle to pick up and work on when there's stuff going on around me. I'm going to have to swatch this time.

achey but happy

We hiked on Monday. Two hours of trudging up and down a gravel road with the baby in my awful sling, and I made it back to the car on my own two feet. That's the farthest I've tried to go since the accident (not to mention the bedrest and c-section), so I'm very proud of myself. I may get to have some fun this summer after all.

After finishing one Pixie Boot from 50 Baby Booties to Knit, I can't stand the idea of knitting a second one. I should do it very soon, because the first one does fit and Quinn needs something to keep his little toes warm if he's going to wear little outfits without feet. I'm telling myself I have to make another stupid Pixie Boot before I try any of the sixteen other patterns in that book that I want to knit. (And I'm really hoping they aren't as much of a pain!) This pair isn't from the book, though, so I can start them whenever I want.

I want to knit a hot water bottle cozy. Walmart doesn't have real hot water bottles anymore, just things that plug in and things that go in the microwave and cost a lot of money and won't fit the pattern. But Target did have a nice reddish pink one with latex warnings all over the outside of the box. I really wanted a blue one (How silly is that?) but not enough to keep dragging three kids to different stores to find it.

In case anyone was wondering, gruesome red Crystal Lite makes very pretty wool. So do Mango and Tangerine Kool Aid.