The Knitting Police

          Friend: There's no such thing as the knitting police, why are you worried..?
          Me: well, I said, not exactly worried, but..
                  I do have a person who comments when I cast on another project
          Friend: OMG, You do have a knitting police!

The thing is that I really have an ongoing list of projects that I work on. I've always been more of a process knitter than a project knitter.

When I started, I knitted projects to learn the techniques. My first cardigan used 5 or 6 - black yarn, kntting intarsia, first collar, first pockets, first button band, knit made by knitting across the fronts - I used 2 yarns, the body was on a US 7, and the band was on a US 5. I charted it because the teacher whose class I was in, insisted that I knit the cardigan from the bottom up!  I also started with a raglan style cardigan, and ended up with a set-in sleeve.

From there, I went to fairisle fingerless gloves of my own pattern, a dress using different weights and types of yarns than the pattern, and mega-cabled socks. I discovered that I love doing cables, but they don't provide much warmth in sweaters. I explored felting, knitting with beads, weaving, and yarn dyeing. I knit baby gifts and gave them away, and learned to knit only for people who could really appreciate the time and effort taken.

Since I work full-time, I just don't have the same time to devote that others might have, my attention wanders easily..unless I focus. It's worse in a group, I really need something mindless at knit night - which means boring stockinette or garter. I find that after interacting with people all day at work, I just don't have much focus or attention.

Last year, I tried to do 12in2012, a knitting challenge which is its own reward to knit 12 projects in a year. Most people churn out 12 small projects. I knit a lot of scarves last year, and cowls. Just one sweater last year.

I do have quite a few sweaters waiting for me to come back to them..hence the large amount of UFOs - unfinished objects (for any of you non knitters). Here's what I have on the needles as WIPs (knitters love acronyms - works in progress) right now.

Can you spot the new project I've just started ?

I've joined the bandwagon of almost 6,000 projects for The Color Affection by Veera Valimaki (sorry missing accents). I'd "invested" in the yarn around Christmas time, and ended up making up my own kit with three colors - a dark brown, middle brownish creme, and a bright pink. I'm through the first section of garter, and onto the striping. Garter. It's all garter - very boring garter, but perfect if your brain has poofed after a week of meetings, discussions, and computer stuff.

So, a short revisit of the rest of my projects on the needles, shall we ?

Next up - Pearl Shawlette - Status - Not Started.  Percent complete: %.  Planned for Ravelympics  Ravellenics but did not have time to start. Hope to start one day.

Silky Leaves Shawl - knitting in the lovely codex - Status - knit 2 strips each of 10 leaves in Murder calls Dr. Hanley (navy), Arkady (brown with blue),Delirium (multi-fall colorway), Petit Prince (light pastel blue), and 1 strip in Spielen am Morgengrauen (gold/blue). Realized I want to both show off the details of the leaves AND have a cohesive shawl knit in this stunning bfl-silk blend. Might be challenging to do both. Need focus to figure out the order of the strips for the shawl

Hush Hoodie - knit in the lovely Skein Fingering merino cashmere in Hush, a light lovely brown.  I'd been away from this for so long that I'm not sure what I have left to do. I think I finally seamed the shoulders, and have to figure out if I want to rip back to the bodice, since I misplaced 6 stitches from one side of the front to the other, or just pick up and knit down on the sleeves. I satisfied, but dissatisfied on this one. I don't need practice on re-doing, and since I don't wear much of what I produce, I'm not sure it's worth the effort to frog and re-do. Percent complete - 70%

Love that Dahlia - still loving the yarn; finally ripped back to the first chart which required attention I didn't have at the time I knit it. Now, my house is quiet and I think I could actually get back to this again, and the colorway is so lovely.

Caribbean Watershed - started January 2011. Was ready to finish off the one side when I realized I have to re-frog, fix and re-do this one. This has been cursed from the start, and really, I just love the yarn and could knit and finish my own creation and call it a customized pattern. I'm sure even the designer will not want to lay claim to the pattern when this is done..if ever.

Kelmscott - also stalled from 2011 or was it 2010 ? I have to go back and check. I fastidiously knit this at knit night until I took a wayward turn at the fronts for neck decrease. No good instructions in this area, and I think I may have to figure out how to reduce the lace and still make it look good on the front - maybe stockinette ? Such a lovely hand, and found the bag this is in, so I want to restart this soon - hah! take that knitting police - it's in my mind..albeit low on the list.

Janel's Class sample sock - from Sock summit 2011 -last summer. such a cute little fairisle sock; not much effort to finish. not sure where i've put it now and even if the needles are still with the project - could be a hibernating project soon.

Regal Silk - had started and knit the hem and it was BY-oo-ti-full! but realized when my mom said "That looks too big on you!" that when I could pull it up over myself over jeans, that she was right - too big. so, sadly need to rip back and figure out if I can make a size that is even on the pattern. It's an olgajazzy pattern - she makes wonderful designs but never seems to have the patterns test knit so patterns have to be heavily modified or analyzed prior to knitting. the regal silk is taunting me it's so gorgeous! Soon my lovely soon - but probably not if kelmscott is ahead of you.

BP Breakwater - have the yarn don't have the inclination. started but the yarn traveller has a bit of a squeak even though it's only wool. weird, i know. somewhere, it's in a project bag, but hasn't had much attention -so status - not really started. ok, not started, and i'm ok with that.

Summery lacewing -  gorgeous yarn I picked, and I finally have a 3rd skein, so enough yarn now to make this for sure. Have to recalc the waist decreases/increases as I've started and frogged this several times as the yarn is different than what the pattern calls for, so i'm essentially designing my own sweater here. I probably should just pick a pattern that actually fits me and use the same lace, but I didn't think to do that at the beginning      (oh man!). why didn't I think out loud earlier ?!
... so, it's been waiting for me to calc,
and to take it off the needles to measure and make sure it isn't too big, as it's bottom up
      (deja vu on the regal silk, for those of you who have read this far!)

Blue - yep still waiting for me to have enough to attention to sleeve the seams that have been pinned now for over a month..or was it two?! can't wait to wear this. Everything has been blocked separately.

So, this I say to the knitting police if you're reading..it's true! the word is out -
I've cast on another project. and it's an easy peasy one, which doesn't require much attention, I hope.
and that's good for me - because it's going to take all the attention that I have right now in my leisure time, to complete it.

now, go bug someone else for a change.

the magical earburn

Today I asked our webadmin at work if he could set up an earburn.
..an earburn to a department head to come read a specific page on our sharepoint site...to respond to a question posed there by our staff.

He kept saying "A what ?! - What's that?!".

ok. seriously, how come noone else knows what that is!

Even after I enlightened him, when I tried to explain, the art of earburning -  I forgot it was a rav-term -being able to call out a particular userid publically, but privately within a closed environment.

Sadly, he could only offer an "alert" - an e-mail with the pasted link to potentially prod the person to go look at the page. It's been a week since the person first posted in the public forum. Seems like a lifetime in an internet world when people connect with each other in a matter of minutes, or less. archaic, really. sad that replying to acknowledge that the person's question was received and is being investigated is put aside to craft the perfect response.

Good things about today

• Gorgeous sunny day
• Afternoon flew by
• Halfway through seven busy days
• Found what I was looking for at Home Depot
• yummy leftovers
• They set up a new fountain at Uptown with water and lights; it is tiled and very beautiful and today lots of kids were running through and getting wet. Also, the grass is still green, and the park benches are still there.

It's been a long week...and it's only Tuesday

Somehow it feels like a verrry long week - and it's only Tuesday. Monday felt like it should have been Thursday at the very least.

A lot of people told me today how tired they were, and felt. It was an overcast day, and somehow the weather seemed to suck the life out of people, quite literally. It was a day of baby steps - 2 steps forward, three steps back..it seemed, all day.

Hopefully, tomorrow will be better and sunnier. Maybe it was just because last week I had a lot going on - the exciting visit at the office, relatives from out of town, and met a friend at Spinnaker's for a yummy meal...and then, I got a lot of stuff done at home on the weekend.

..could be the lull before the storm ?

A brush with greatness

Tuesday, my boss at work brought her daughter in to meet us.

Her name is Gillian Carleton and she and her teammates won Bronze at the London Olympics for the Track Cycling. She brought in her bicycle and bronze medal to show.

Gillian talked to us about her bicycle, being at the Olympics, her ride, and the race itself.
On the left with her bicycle (weighs 16lbs, or 14.5 with her race wheels on); and on the right with her Mom (Nancy Carleton), also a triathalon champion.

   

   

With her medal-which is surprisingly heavy. 

According to Wikipedia, the bronze medal is made up of 97 percent copper, 2.5 percent zinc and 0.5 percent tin. Info about the London medals on wikipedia here.

I also finished up by Seastorm of Petals (#8 of 12) - i think I could have made the shawl smaller to be more of a tight cowl; I think it will be more like a staged shawl.

Yarn is Sweet Fiber Yarns in Heirloom (70% Silk; 30% Cashmere Top). It is so soft; such a lovely hand. The colorway is seastorm. Shown below the cowl blocking, and the original skein (shown right):
























and I'm continuing with leaves - this is Strip 3 in Arkady - coppery-brown and blues:

Scalene Shawl Complete

TA DA!





and



Interesting technique - this shawl has 2 keyholes, to allow you to tuck in the ends, and make a neckerchief.

To allow more versatility, I modified by making the first keyhole red, and the second keyhole black.
I also modified Section 4 of the pattern to end with a larger stripe of black. This makes the shawl more striking next to my face, but less symmetrical.

I was surprised at my commitment to complete the shawl even though it's garter. A very boring knit, but I like the result. Also, I my shawl is rounder and larger than most people's as I inadvertently increased on the middle band (section 2) on both ends, so I increased at a faster rate  - I ended up with 437 stitches before the Jenny’s Surprisingly Stretchy Bind-off. I was supposed to have 302 stitches total. ha! yes, as you know, I cannot follow a pattern.

As for my other project, I decided with less than 2 days left to the Ravellenic timeframe, I wasn't going to start another project and be frustrated so I decided not to start the other planned project - the Strands of Pearl shawl, that will have to be for another day.

Ravellenics

I cast-on Scalene last Friday, a garter shawl. I know, I know, I'm not really into garter, but it seems to be knitting up fairly fast, and I hope to finish it and perhaps another shawl in the 2-week timeframe.



The colors I'm using are SG Rhinocerous Beetle which is a black, and the January Nudibranch which is a Rusty-red color. The contrast is striking and so far it's a very pleasing knit.

 

These leaves are lovely to knit, but currently on hold.
The project doesn't meet the requirements for wips-wrestling which is the normal event I enter.
Projects had to have not been worked on since mid May to qualify for wips-wrestling, so this will have to go on hold until I'm through the Ravellenic period.

Hurry up and wait..

The weeks have flown by and I'm still living without a dishwasher and in a challenged space. I pushed and pushed to have work done at my place in a timely manner. I was project manager extraordinaire even though the resources were not my own, and I didn't know about any of the other dependencies or competing projects. The weather's been warm, hot, overcast, stormy, rainy, electrifying, dry, and warm again, and I've had a train of people coming in and out.

Today, at last, we're ready to paint, and I know I have that little paint can just waiting for me...and there it is. I take a snap and e-mail it so I can get the quote in my hands, and realize as I turn the corner into my bathroom that that the walls are not as I remembered, they're not the same colour as the kitchen, that of the paint in the cute little can. Nope, it's a light peachy colour. So, another little surprise expense unplanned. People tell me that work on your home is always more than you expect, so to budget a bit more than you plan for just such surprises. At this point, I'd say budgeting 30% more or more, and allowing for 3x as much time as you think the  minimum will be.

Some weird weather we're having

Five people told me today about the thunder / lightning and torrential downpour last night (thursday). I woke up twice in the night myself to the rumbling thunder, but no lightning. I suppose I'm not high enough to see it.

When I looked out, everything was green and calm.  Then, when I was just settling back to sleep, an incredible downpour of rain pelting the roof - twice in one night, both times -  short but intense.

In the morning, overcast skies with just a hint of blue peeking out when I looked out of my window at work warmed to sunny weather in the afternoon, coinciding with free "refreshers *" at starbucks this afternoon. Again some weird rain - lightning bouts alternating with flashes in the sky at knit night, and driving home, a few streaks of light horizontally across the purple night sky.


* Refresher a.k.a the equivalent of an italian soda made with regular tap water instead of carbonated.  Pretty amazing how they can evolve another $4+ product line from watered down juice and ice. One was a lime-mint flavour, looks/tastes like a mojito mix without the alcohol, and the others a berry mixture with a few frozen berries thrown in. ka-ching.

The secret handshake

"Yarn", I said, as I stood in front of a lady standing in a small crowd that had gathered in front of Future Shop today.  The lady looked at me blankly.

I said it again softly. She turned to me and stared. When I asked her her name, it turned out she was the wrong lady. Turns out Future Shop was having some kind of gaming release, so there was a reason for the small crowd that gathered there.

I ended up finding the knitter I was looking for; turns out, I was early for once, and she arrived right on time. I didn't have to say "Yarn", either, I just showed her the yarn, and she smiled.

The Levenwick is off the needles....

I finally finished the button band on the Levenwick, and blocked it last weekend:



and I've pinned Larch, but not seamed yet.

Meanwhile, new projects are beckoning...
I started one long-term one - 

(a) a Sylvan Blanket which is made with leaf strips dovetailed together.



The yarn is SG Codex in Delirium. Here is a pic of the original skeins:



Two leaves measures 9" long, and 3" wide.     

I have about 26 strips to make, each with a guesstimated 16 leaves, and using ~48g of yarn.

So far at knit night, I knit 6 leaves, so I have 8 total.
Needle Size: US 7


and hopefully, a short-term one - 

(b) a Summery Lacewing top. Intended to be using corn yarn, but I'm adapting the yarn, the gauge, and hoping I can adjust the decreases to the waist, and increases.

Here's the start -



US 6 for the border cast-on and for the body.
My gauge 24st/32 R, targeting the 38.5" for 36".

and the yarn: