Three or four hours later...

It doesn't look like gorgeous stuff from the LYS anymore. It looks more like a big ball of something from Walmart or the bins at GoodWill, except I know deep in my heart that it's got enough natural fiber to make a much better shawl than 100% acrylic would. I'm still getting over the tangled mess I made while trying to wind it from the skein into a ball, and how much less vivid the the colors are now that they're not all perfectly aligned anymore.



I like it better knitted up, so I guess I'll keep my swatch close until Tuesday morning and hopefully by then I'll know if I want to buy enough to do a shawl.

Oh, and Ruffles is finally done now that I've woven in the ends and taken a picture!



Pattern from Scarf Style...TLC Cotton Plus...size 6 Denise Needles...more short rows than I ever would've imagined possible... But it was fun, and I might do another one if I had the right yarn or recipient in mind.

After a little pregnancy scare last night -- that now seems to be absolutely nothing to worry about -- I'm not supposed to lift today. So I'm taking advantage of the break to catch up on little knitting projects and hope to finish that baby sock tonight, if my fussy baby boy stays happy or goes to bed early enough.

I need better equipment

This is the sort of thing that makes me think I should save up for a swift and ballwinder instead of spending all of my yarn money on yarn and patterns! I've got to conquer my fear and wind it into a ball today, though, because they'll only hold the other skein for me until Tuesday and before I buy another 500+ yards I should make sure I actually like the way the colors work up as much as I hope I will.

AND I've got to pack boxes, and maybe drive down to get the playpen, which I'm furious with myself for leaving at the new house.

I've got Silky Wool on the brain...

It started when I saw the finished Barbara Shawl at Missouri Star. Then it escalated when I pulled up the pattern for Branching Out and saw that it was done in the same color I had in my hands the last time I was at Fabric Depot. I don't know why I talked myself out of buying that yarn. I spent a big chunk of an afternoon helping my husband move one of his old trucks and wishing I had some of that yarn. It's possible that my desire for the yarn was magnified by the really really disgusting interior of the truck.

Of course the LYS's in town don't have Silky Wool, but they did have the gorgeous stuff I fell in love with a few months ago was still there, and it was 30% off, and I had cash in my purse from hauling a ton of books to the used bookstores around town. So now I've got a huge skein of gorgeous orange/brown/flamey yarn that I'm going to swatch and see if I can make a shawl out of.

That -- and all the rest of my yarn -- will have to keep me entertained until I can get to the next 30% off sale up at Fabric Depot, probably in October.

I did got to spend most of the day yesterday in a back bedroom of the new house, watching the baby play and knitting while they put the new carpet in the front room. I could've finished his little socks, but I left the finished one at home and didn't know how long to make it. At 6am, it hadn't seemed like a good idea to take my whole knitting box in the car. By noon, I really wished I had it with me. So I did the cuff of the sock and then 2 1/2 repeats of the scarf. Don't know if it was the knitting or just being able to sit for such a big chunk of the day, or maybe almost sorta sleeping in this morning (had to explain to Quinn what we were doing every half hour or so), but I'm feeling a lot calmer and more rested than I have in a while.

The sock is just barely the tiniest bit too small. Another round or two, and it would have been perfect. I suppose I could undo the toe, frog back and add a few rounds, but I'm not going to. I'm going to finish the second sock, and save the pair for baby #4. And then I'm going to make Quinn a bigger pair out of the more colorful yarn.

Ruffles is all done except for the ends, proof that if you plod along for long enough you will finish something. It was a fun project to work on, and I'm not sure what I'll replace it with.

I started out on a bit of a wild goose chase this afternoon, after reading on someone's blog that Elann had a new merino laceweight. I never did find a trace of it on their site, so either they sold out instantly, or the blogger meant Knitpicks. Either way, I found a really cute pattern for baby socks. Only one problem...all of my sock yarn is fifty miles from here. I'd already driven down and back today, so there was no reasonable excuse to make another trip. Maybe two problems....I don't think I've got any single skeins of sock yarn in boyish colors and it would be wasteful to use part of one skein and leave myself without enough for an adult pair, right? I've got the solid colors I bought for the Better Than Booties Baby Socks, and they're here, but they're solid. And the whole point of today's little obsession is to make striped baby socks.

Then the kids and I went to visit Aunt Nita and came home with a big bag of yarn. Including partial skeins of sock yarn in about five different colors! And a partial skein of Fixation, which is going to be a pair of Baby Broadripple Socks when it grows up. There was also a gorgeous skein of Opal, two gorgeous skeins of Regia, and more great stuff than I have time to list right now, but I'm all excited about having yarn for my baby socks and will play with the rest of it later.



Now, do I hope he stays asleep until morning, or that he wakes up soon so I can make sure it fits?

This morning, I abandoned my boxes, grabbed the kids, and headed for the thrift stores. The plan was to see if I could find stuff that, combined with some of the goodies I've discovered while filling boxes, would justify joining the Vintage Swap, but that didn't work out. The swap filled up while we were moving trucks yesterday. But all's not lost. I'll happily keep the stuff I did pick up.



The apron was never going to go live with anyone else anyway. It's so perfectly what I would have been looking for if I'd had a row of aprons on hangers to pick from...and it came out of the bottom of a GoodWill bin and probably cost a quarter!



The sweater has problems, but it also has six absolutely gorgeous metal clasps that I plan on removing before I toss it into the washer and see what felting does to it. I haven't knitted anything that needs a clasp yet, but I'm sure I'll make something sooner or later. And I like the pretty clasps.

I'm so happy with my apron and the sweater claps, I didn't feel too jealous when a pair of ladies next to us unearthed a gorgeous quilt top. I'd seen quilts in their basket, but assumed they were the mass produced department store kind. It never crossed my mind that there would be a real quilt lurking under the rest of the nasty bedding. Next time, I'll pay more attention!

Now I suppose I should get back to the boxes.

Heaven...I'm in Heaven....

I was starting to worry that by the time I got all of the boxes and Rubbermaid bins and mesh laundry bags and everything else inside, my sewing room would be bursting at the seams. Somehow though, it all tucked nicely away and I've still got plenty of room to knit and sew and dream. I swear I could double - maybe triple - my yarn and fabric stash and still fit it all in there!

The pictures aren't great, but you get the idea...





I spent a big chunk of the last two days stretched out on the twin bed the previous owners left, nursing my baby and staring at my yarn. After getting up at 5am and packing like mad until I had enough full boxes to justify the trip. It's even better than stretching out on the new couch and watching trees flutter outside the windows.

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?