The move drags slowly on...

When did it become my mission in life to keep track of every different promotion Home Depot, Lowes, and everyone else is offering and how we can combine them to get the best deals on our appliances and carpet? I do not remember signing up for that!

Ruffles is a little more than half done, and it's turned out to be the perfect project for me to work on right now. It takes about four minutes to do a section of short rows and even if I put it down in the middle of one, the wrapped stitches are easy to read and I can get myself back on track without much thought or stress. Which is good, because I've been going for days without any knitting and if I had to remember where I was and what I was doing, I'd just fall apart and shove it back into the knitting bag.

And Knitpicks has new laceweight! I had already ordered three skeins of the paint-your-own (along with the Dancing and solid sock yarn that were the reason I was ordering in the first place) before realizing that they also had Shadow and Gossamer. Now I'm trying to figure out how soon I can get away with placing another order so I can have some of the pretty colored stuff.

I just spent a couple of hours blindly following the instructions for my dolly shawl while halfway watching Lifeboat and I think I'm doing it right! I seem to have all the right parts in all the right places. Now I want to rush out and find a pattern and yarn for a person size Faroese Shawl...

BTW, the yarn really is a much prettier color in person!

That ball of yummy wine colored yarn that's been living on the edge of my desk and making me wish there was more of it has decided that it wants to be a Dolly Faroese Shawl. I like this idea, which will let me play with the pretty yarn while hopefully figuring out how these shawls work so I can make a big one for myself. The first few steps of the pattern are intimidating, but I'm going to give it a shot after the kids are in bed, if the littlest one cooperates.

I never ever wear mittens, but I want to knit them. I've got a gorgeous pattern and the right yarn, but that doesn't stop me from suddenly coveting A Year of Mittens from Two Old Bags. Maybe I can knit a bunch of mittens to hang around the house as wintery decorations...which wouldn't have to fit anyone's hands...which suddenly sounds like a really really good idea....

It hasn't cooled down any, but my urge to have a FO got stronger than my fear of melting, and I finished binding off my Pinwheel Baby Blanket.



Did I mention how happy I am with this project? It came out to almost 40" across, using 2 skeins of SuperSaver and size 9 needles. I definitely need some kind of crocheted edging to tame the curling stockinette, but for now it's semi-finished and will be useful if it ever gets cold enough to need a blanket again. That was a lot of knitting fun for a $4.50 yarn investment! As soon as the weather changes, I'm going to start another one and play with stitch patterns.



Ruffles is coming along nicely, even if it does look like it'll take a long time to finish. I'm enjoying the technique, have the stitch pattern memorized, and have learned to read my knitting well enough to tell which short row I'm on if I put it down in the middle of a repeat. It's interesting, but not quite easy enough to do with a baby in my lap.

Ruffles!

It's far too hot in this house to finish binding off the 500 stitches of the pinwheel baby blanket, especially since I've still got to learn how to do a crocheted edging and having it bound off won't mean the blanket is finished. It's too hot to read blogs, too hot to pack boxes, just about too hot to breathe...

So I cast on for Ruffles...



It's too hot for this too, but I've got to do something.

New Theory

Everyone says that if you move into a bigger house, your things will expand to fill all of the new storage space. What they don't say is that as you take boxes and boxes out of the house you're trying to pack, the stuff that's left will do the same thing. How does this work?! Is the secret to shove it all into boxes really really fast before it has time to spread or multiply or whatever it's doing?

Despite the fact that it's miserably hot today (the thermometer in the Durango tried to tell me it's 110 in the driveway, but I know it's not quite that bad), I made a respectable amount of progress. You can't see any of it, but I know I put lots of stuff in boxes and hauled lots more stuff to Goodwill.

And while I was catching my breath and reading my email, I followed a link to see a picture of Spring Fling and stumbled across what's got to be the most amazing cabled afghan ever.

I've wanted to make a cabled afghan for ages, but never found the pattern that made me run out and buy yarn. When I found what I thought was the perfect pattern and
what I thought was the perfect yarn (for my budget at that time )the afghan was knitted in panels, and had lots of bobbles, and I'd been reading too much crap on the knitlist about the evils of acrylic and actually took the yarn back to the
store.

What makes me feel really silly is that I've been thinking about using some scratchy grey wool that was a thrift store sweater to make a cabled purse, just a long rectangle folded in half. Why didn't it ever occur to me that I could drag home a bunch of library books and dream up my own?!

Color!

I needed to get out of the house. I need to get out and never come back, but I can't do that quite yet. I can do that soon.



Yesterday, we ran off to the Sisters Outdoor Quilt Show and spent four and a half hours wandering around and taking in the gorgeous eye candy. The whole town has quilts hanging from every building down every side street, and there's too much to possibly see it all. One of these years, I want to go all by myself so I can read every tag on every last quilt.

I saw lots of things I'm just dying to learn how to do myself, especially the elaborate Celtic Knot quilts and the one that had constellations embroidered on the border. I've got some dark blue fabric I bought for Heath's Titanic quilt that I could use, and a book of constellations, and white embroidery floss...and there was the crazy quilt done in Halloween prints....and the incredibly detailed applique....

My brain is totally overflowing with the things I could do with the fabric I've already got in my stash.

And while I was digging through the mess in the shop, I found the Mysterious Toaster Oven, which I thought was long gone. I don't even know where it came from in the first place. Years ago, when the oven in our apartment had been broken for so long that I was seriously reading online advice about how to cook in your dishwasher (which I never got desperate enough to actually try), I glanced over and realized that that white thing sitting there taking up counter space was a toaster oven. Our toaster oven, because I know it didn't come with the apartment, but no one seems sure exactly where it did come from. My best guess is that it probably belonged to my father's parents and made its way to our house with a bunch of other stuff that we were given after they died. Assuming that it still works (and of course it will because it seems to be a magic appliance that turns up when I need it), this means I can finally use the Fimo I bought to make buttons or stitch markers or whatever without worrying that it's going to release toxic fumes into the kitchen and give us all brain damage.

I know, I should be packing.

I Hate Cardboard

I don't like cardboard. I don't like the feel of it, or the smell of it, or anything else about it. I especially hate cardboard boxes.

I thought I hated brown, but then I found the cone of pretty brown laceweight stuff while I was digging for blue acrylic. According to the tag inside, it's wool...or bamboo....or both? Brown is obviously not the problem. I can do something with this. And with the brownish Woolease and the two wool sweaters that are waiting to be unraveled into yummy soft brown yarn.



The problem is the stupid boxes that have taken over my life.

I've got two houses now

We signed the papers yesterday and the sellers signed this morning and the wonderful house is (or very shortly will be) ours! I have 10 days or so (I'm not quite convinced because it still keeps changing) to pack everything we own so we can get it from here to there. How are you supposed to pack a house that you're still living in and supervise three kids at the same time?

I'm keeping myself sane with the round baby blanket. It's growing and growing and pretty soon it'll be time to add the border and then it won't be easy anymore. I think I found some blue acrylic that'll work. It has to work because I can't buy yarn right now and the other blue acrylic I was digging for no longer exists. Something to do with a five year old and scissors and the fact that I'm not giving his big sister any more yarn for her stash if that's what they're going to do to it.

There's a whole beautiful gallery of pinwheel blankets. After looking at them, I can picture myself making nothing but round baby blankets for months to come. I probably won't do that, but it's entertaining to daydream about what I could do with the rest of that blue yarn I just dug out of the plastic storage bins.

I've been at the coast with my pinwheel baby blanket & husband & kids. Swimming and hiking and watching fireworks and whales and being far away from the bank and the title company and the boxes that now dominate my life.

Now I've got four days to get the closing papers signed and pack a bunch of boxes before I play hooky again and run off to the Sisters Outdoor Quilt Show next weekend....then another few days to pack like mad before the new Harry Potter book comes out....

These little distractions don't keep me from obsessing that I want my new house and I want it now! I even have new furniture for it. New furniture that's already there while I'm stuck here. How unfair is that?! There's a green couch that's apparently been eaten a bit by ferrets, but the damage is hidden under a quilt and since that was being given to us along with the quilt, I really didn't think it was polite to poke around under the cushions...and a matching oversize chair and love seat that both are in great shape...and a big square coffee table with drawers and a glass top that you can display things under (which should go perfectly with the Victorian love seat my grandmother left me) and an antique dresser thing with glass drawer pulls and a layer of chipped white enamel paint that's about an inch thick. And stools for the bar in the kitchen, and a neat wooden plant stand. Not bad for $128! And the sellers are leaving me both picnic tables and the wooden lawn chairs I was hoping for.

Now I've got to convince Bill that the ancient flowered carpet in the new living room isn't going to somehow poison the baby. It needs to be replaced, but it's so pretty. And it was just shampooed. I'd like to live with it for at least a little while.

I added another two inches or so to the diameter of my pinwheel baby blanket tonight while watching The Hole. I thought the rounds were starting to take forever, but apparently they're not!

If I'd knit a couple more rows on my scarf and bound it off before frogging the whole thing, would that have counted as a finished object?

Instead of working on one of the projects I had laid out, I wound up playing with a skein of Sari that's been again in my stash for quite a while. The pattern I ordered it for uses size 50 needles, which I still don't have. So I swatched with my 35s and discovered that there is no way on this earth I'm knitting anything on those. So I cast on with some 13s and made most of a very cute scarf. I dropped every third stitch so it had more texture. The bronze and copper colors of the yarn were gorgeous....... I was happy with it until I realized that it wasn't going to use anywhere near the full ball of yarn, even if I added fringe. Using half of the ball on a scarf I probably won't ever wear seemed wrong, and at about that time I dropped the wrong stitch and instead of fixing it, I unravelled the whole thing and put it away until I think of something more useful to make with it. Or more fun.

Don't know what to do with myself...

I get to knit tonight. After spending most of the day sorting through stuff and putting together the 18 boxes of books I hauled to GoodWill, I deserve a long stretch of time to work on whatever I want to. Too bad I don't know what I want to work on!

Not the round baby blanket. Or the Euroflax stole. Those are my big no-concentration projects.

Maybe the notebook cover, which I started last night. It'll probably be more fun once my first triangle is wide enough and I get to start the short rows.

I could swatch for Spring Fling....or Trellis (after the trip to GoodWill, we stopped at Tuesday Morning for three skeins of Pistachio Cotto-Ease)...or I could dig out the pattern for Ruffles and start it with the pink Cotton Plus....the sock yarn won't get the gauge the neat sock pattern calls for, so that won't work...

There's got to be something exciting in that pile of pretty yarn!

Black Sheep Gathering

I love the Black Sheep Gathering. I love my little baby who let me haul him around the Black Sheep Gathering for six hours, only fussing when a sheep made a loud scary noise at him, and my five year old who put up with the experience. Alex doesn't get any credit because she was having as much fun as I was.

That lace knitting I thought I was doing? My lace is nothing like the beautiful creations I saw today! Skaska Designs had a booth draped with the most beautiful shawls -- so many it was impossible to take them all in.

I saw the Heirloom Baby Aran from IK knitted up, and I've definitely got to work up the courage to tackle this one before Quinn is bigger than the largest size.

I think I found out what I'm doing wrong with my spinning.

And as a souvenir, I bought a skein of gorgeous lace weight alpaca to use for the Flared Lace Smoke Ring. That should last longer than a t-shirt, right?

Packing and Abandoned Plans

I'm packing today. It's not fun. I'm only doing it because I'm hoping to make it to the Black Sheep Gathering on Saturday and don't want to be reminded that I should be working on the house.

I tried to work on the Sunshine Sweater this morning while the ER reruns were on. Packing is more fun than struggling with that d--- sweater. So it's been laid to rest. After wrestling with it for a whole fifteen minutes, I came to the conclusion that since it won't fit Heath now and wouldn't fit Quinn until he's at least three, since the yarn hurts my hands, and since I can't remember how to do the slip stitch color pattern, there's no reason to suffer through it just because months ago I spent ten bucks on yarn and finished two sleeves. I transferred the live stitches to a length of waste yarn, wrote down what needles I was using and what size I was making on the working copy of the pattern, and shoved the whole mess into a mesh laundry bag which I'll hide somewhere in the rest of the stash until I find a new use for the yarn or decide to finish the sweater after all, and removed it from my list of WIPs. It's gone and I feel good about it.

There were six projects on the list that made up the plan. I've finished three and will finish the second bootie as soon as I unearth the stupid book with the pattern in it. That only leaves the cardigan which needles sleeves and seams. It's warm and getting warmer -- I'm not convinced I need to finish a heavy cardigan right now.

And if I'm going to pack everything we own into endless boxes, I deserve to spend the rest of my time knitting something fun!

High Stress Knitting

I don't felt often. I love the look of felted knits, it's just that the process of felting scares the pants off me. There's no turning back if it goes horribly wrong. Not that I've had anything go wrong yet, but it could and if I'd spent a lot of money on pretty yarn that turned into a worthless mess it'd take me a long time to get over it.

I had the patterns for the Buttonhole Bag and the sweater with the little horsies on it in a project bag with the yarn and needles, so last night after the kids were in bed I cast on and started knitting before I lost my nerve. By midnight, I had the horses almost done and was starting to worry that the stranded color work might not felt right. I was a good little knitter and waited until morning to finish the top handles instead of rushing through them and trying to felt it at 2am. Which I've done before -- that's definitely hard on the nerves!

I can't believe how easily this thing felted. Four minutes of agitation and it looked pretty good. A couple more minutes and it was done! I did knit a swatch and sort of felt it in the sink to make sure the different brands of wool I used would play nicely together, but I'm still amazed it felted so quickly.

 I used a single strand of worsted weight wool (Plymouth Galway and Knitpicks WOTA) and sort of kind of followed the pattern for the shaping, adding increase rows to get enough stitches for the horse pattern,making it taller, and making the buttonholes wider. The whole process probably didn't take more than four hours total.

Summer of Lace...and Socks...And Embroidery...

I finished the Cathedral Window Shawl without making a total mess of it!



After lots of false starts over a period of months and months, things suddenly came together and got easy. I even managed to graft the two sides together instead of doing the three needle bindoff that was going to be my last resort.

I'm please with the way it came out. Actually, I'm on the verge of jumping up and down and screaming. This was a big finish, the kind that under normal circumstances would justify buying wonderful new yarn. Or at least something to wear under it, since I obviously wasn't thinking about what would match the grape yarn when I ordered it from Elann.

Actually, I'm not sure when or if I'll wear it outside. This thing weighs an absolute ton. I spent real money on the yarn, unlike Clapotis which materialized out of yardsale stuff and can get tossed into the stroller or backseat without guilt. Which means it's handy when I need it. I feel like I've got to take better care of Cathedral Windows which, knowing me, means it's going to be hidden out of sight and I'll forget it's there.

Next step in the lacey summer...probably more of the Euroflax Stole...a pi shawl if I can figure out where I put the yarn and if it still seems like a good idea after I swatch it. This morning, I was dreaming so vividly of knitting that it was a shock to wake up and realize that there wasn't a shawl in the bed with me.

I really do knit!

When I'm not reading blogs and following links to neat patterns for aprons and lacy baby bonnets, I do get some knitting done:



Not bad for 4 days of off and on knitting, especially on a project that's been jinxed for the past seven months! And I've been hauling it around with me, knitting while I watch the kids play outside and wait for Alex to get through with her Karate class. There are a few little mistakes, and the second row of windows is one row shorter than the others, but since I did the first half while I was in the hospital and heavily medicated and know I was making mistakes then, I'm not worried about making this half perfect. I don't knit perfect things.

Four more repeats to go, then I've got to weave in a lot of ends and learn to graft garter stitch. Or whatever it takes to hold both halves together.

Tonight's obsession is BAGS. The sewing tote I got the pattern for on the shop hop last week...the patchwork one I think I can make with the squares of flannel I got in the grab bag I bought on the shop hop...the wedding ring bag I found in The Ultimate Collection of Classic Quilt Blocks...the bag Mom and I both fell in love with on the shop hop and were told there wasn't a pattern for (but she found the pattern at several different quilt shops while she was shopping with a friend this week -- yippee!!)...and the idea that I might be able to use a slip stitched pattern on a Button Bag.

I'm going to stay up late and watch movies and play. Hopefully the rest of the family will cooperate!

I've gotten myself a bit lost

I can't tear myself away from the Garnstudio website. All of those wristwarmer patterns I fell in love with a while back are there -- and they're free. They're also in Norwegian, but that's a teeny tiny little detail.

As if the pretty wristwarmers weren't enough, their baby patterns are spectacular. This and that in particular. Not that there's any way I'm going to learn to knit patterns like that, let alone patterns like that in a language I don't speak, before my baby is too big for them, but this is fantasy knitting.

I printed up this wristwarmer pattern, along with their page of knitting term translations and my Googling also turned up
Norwegian to English Knitting Lessons It must be possible to knit from these patterns, or American LYSs wouldn't be selling them. I do wonder why the catalog didn't mention that the patterns weren't in English. If I'd splurged to order a pattern I couldn't read, I would not have been a happy knitter!

Before I got all obsessed by the pretty Norwegian stuff, I jumped on the bandwagon that's taking everyone to Tuesday Morning and came home with two bags of Wool-Ease Sportweight, which I haven't been able to find locally. Three skeins of black, for the Knitty Spring Fling cardigan (thought I was going to have to do it in a baby color or wait months and months for the Mill End Store to have a 25% off coupon and then hope I had money by then) and three skeins of the natural color for socks or a baby aran or I don't know what. I didn't buy any Cotton-Ease, then I got home and found out that it's the exact gauge and fiber content as the two tops from Rebecca I want to try resizing. I'm trying very hard to be good and stay away from the tempting yarn. I don't know if I can successfully resize the patterns or not. If I do make them fit, they wouldn't be practical for nursing in. I really don't need this yarn right now. But I do kinda want it.

Socks!

I did it! Just like the pattern said, I finished Lolita Toes with one skein of Fixation. I used the ankle from a different pattern to make them shorter, but I also wear a size 10 shoe, so I'm sure it somehow balances out. They're done, and I didn't run out of yarn, and they fit!

Bad Bonnet Sue

I'm in a weird mood today. It started out with a search for traditional Sunbonnet Sue patterns, or maybe some redwork, and I wound up here. I like the devil Sue, and the Lizzie Borden Sue -- they're cute. Sue sitting on the toilet or mooning people is just a bit too tacky and crude for my taste. I'd rather see her freezing on a life preserver while the Titanic goes down behind her, or hanging out of the mouth of a gator.

And those reminded me of the Touch My Scissors and Die wall quilt we saw on the shop hop. Mom didn't approve. I doubt she'd like BadBonnet Sue much, either.

My Lolita toes are coming along nicely, and it looks like I may really have enough yarn to finish them. I think I'm going to make the ankle more like these instead of the picot edge the pattern calls for. Since this is another pattern that says you can make a pair of socks with one skein of fixation, I'm feeling pretty optimistic. And I'm loving the way the yarn is working up. It's tiger lace!