Sockapaloooza Socks are Pink

And so are the piggies playing hide and go seek in my socks!



My sockapaloooza socks are also among the pink knitting I've been working on this month. I didn't get them finished, but I do have the leg done. This means I'm 3/4's of the way done with my sock pal's socks and there's pretty much no way that I'll be getting a pair for myself finished before the ship-by date for the exchange. Oh, well...

I'm getting tired of this pattern anyways and have already ripped out the second left sock of Knitting Olympics fame. I'm loving Nancy Bush's patterns so I'll most likely do another sock from Knitting Vintage Socks with my ball of this lovely pink sock yarn, just not this same one... at least not right away.

Plum Trees are Pink

Literally, the tree's branches are slightly pinkish. Some of it is the last of the red berries from this past fall, but mostly the branches themselves look slightly pink to me.



As always photo credits go to Peacock.

Red Tree Fabric

So I got a new project for myself while I was in Buffalo about a week back.



Mind you I don't sew.

Well, I don't sew very well, or very often, or particularly happily, but I fell in love with the tree fabric and the batiks went so well with it that I figured it couldn't possibly kill me to make a couple of pillows. I'll be moving this summer and needing to furnish an apartment so I'll need throw pillows for the couch, right?

You can pick a couch to match your throw pillows? Even if they're still embryonic throw pillows? I'm not willing to bet these fabrics will be anything but fabric by the end of the summer, but maybe, just maybe, I'll get my sewing machine to cooperate and I'll make pillow covers out of them.

Yarn Flowers

I got the card at the yarn shop because it was pink and then realized the ball of yarn looked almost like the other piece of a pair.
The pink yarn is the same yarn I used for the Branching Out swatch. It has been ripped and returned to its natural balled state.

Contest - _____ are Pink

A contest for all the project spectrum people out there (and for anyone else that's reading this blog too).
Many things in this picture are pink. What are they?



(hint: they're all the same thing, there's just lots and lots of them in the picture)

The prize is a bundle of pink wool spinning fluff blended and carded by me.
Send your answers to onmyneedles at yahoo dot com by the end of March.
If I get more than one right answer, I'll draw from a hat to find out who gets the fluff.

Green Presents

Project Spectrum says March is for pink and red. My blog friends say March is for Saint Patrick's Day and green presents in my mailbox.

First I got a Saint Patrick's day card from Kim! It was a little misshappen when it arrived and I was afraid the post office had mangled it. However, it felt a little heavy and when I opened it I discovered a pad of sticky-notes with pink and green and brown polka dots. I love it.



Maybe a day later I got a package from Mia which had two green patterned handkercheifs, a card with a whole bunch of glitter poised ready to explode from the envelope (a clean-up project I narrowly avoided and then sent gleefully on to my SP (evil grin)), and some wonderful powdered sugar coated cookies. Peacock ate lots of them and said, "Mia makes the bestest cookies ever!"



I'm inclined to agree about the cookies. There are no more of them and my pants don't quite fit right at the moment... (sheepish smile)

Thank you both. You make me feel loved, and that is a very good feeling indeed.

Pink Knitting

What's wrong with this picture?



That's right, this knitting is not pink.
The post's title is not completely without warrant because this knitting is quite pink.



The ball of pink yarn came to me from Andrea over at Mellow Trouble when she sent me the yarn for the SYNO scarf swap. The yarn, Rowan Summer Tweed has a very crunchy hand that is startling but not unpleasant to knit with. I thought about doing an entire scarf swatch, but realized that I was not anywhere close to making gauge and therefore could not possibly get an entire scarf out that single ball of yarn. Therefore it's a swatch and will be ripped back out at some point in the near future.

The white at the top is the Martian Mountain Cow from earlier posts. Since that is how it looks knit on size 8 (5 mm) needles, I'm willing to concede that I failed to spin fingering weight yarn. At this point I think the yarn is roughly dk or sport weight. Bother. Actually, a Big Bother. I was planning on knitting another Leaf Lace Shawl out of it, but discovered after knitting a significant portion yarn that there was just no way that it would get large enough to make me happy. I didn't even think to take a picture of it before I pulled it back out. Bother.

But life moves on. I'm enjoying Branching Out much more than I thought I would. I've made one minor pattern modification. Where the pattern suggests making a left leaning double decrease by sl-k2tog-psso, I'm doing a sl3-k3togtbl as suggested by Eunny instead. Her Majoring In Lace series has been fabulous reading and is increasing my understanding of what's going on while lace is being knit by leaps and bounds.

I have delusions images of making a branching out stole by mirroring the lace pattern on itself and winding up with something that looks more like an arbor full of leaves. Just not for this project. I have a lovely skein of green silky wool that I think would be perfect for that stole. Though I suppose if it is actually to be a stole I'll need more than one ball of yarn.

Pretty Pink Trees

What's wrong with this picture?



That's right, this tree is not covered in pretty pink flowers! I asked Peacock to make me a copy of this picture for the blog because I could have sworn that this tree was a flowering cherry covered in lovely pale pink blossoms. I was wrong!

It's not the first time I've been wrong lately... ask me what time Morfey's Cake Shop closes on Saturdays. Now ask me why I know. I got the cake, I didn't get shot, all is well.

Here's a picture of a pretty pink tree.



It's a lovely tree and an nicely composed picture, but the tree is nowhere near as spectacular as the maple above. Oh, well... Not every tree can be blessed with such lovely lines.

Piggies are Pink

A long time ago I promised an introduction to the Piggies.

They've been having too much fun playing hide and seek in my yarn to pose for a family portrait, so I told them they would be fenced out of the yarn stash if they didn't cooperate.

What'd'ya'know it worked.

All five of them clambered right up onto the photo fabric and demanded that pictures be taken.



Right after I got the formal pictures finished, they started demanding yarn to romp in. Realizing a photo opportunity when I had one, I got out all the pink yarn I could find. It is, after all, March.



Don't get between the Piggies and "their" yarn! How many Piggies do you see?

At any rate, I promised actual introductions instead of just the usual pictures.

Mommy Piggy and Poppy Piggy both came from Old Navy at Halloween a couple years ago. Appropriately they're piggy banks. They also happen to glow in the dark. Immediately upon unwrapping them I noticed that they were that particular shade of sickly plastic that should denote something that glows. It took me 6 months to catch them in the act... and when I did, I yelped and nearly jumped off the bed. Peacock responded by laughing at me!

At some point two little ones showed up. I didn't notice any signs of pregnancy, but that's happened with pets before... (ask me about the gerbils if you really want to know!). At some point after that, one more little one arrived. I guess no one told the Piggies that piggies have litters.

Leaf Lace Shawl - Completely Finished

I blocked the blue koigu leaf lace shawl during the Knitting Olympics. I appear to have forgotten to post pictures of it. Now is the time to fix that error.



Isn't the puppy cute?
At that particular moment he was watching me wipe puppy slobber on the Boyfriend (he was wearing a grubby sweatshirt that was going to be laundered later that day). There is one fascinating characteristic of this puppy's slobber. It doesn't matter if you've wiped it off or let it dry completely, when you wash your hands the puppy slobber will instantly turn into SLIME. Not just your average slime, but 'oh, my gawd, what did I get on my hands' style SLIME. It's disgusting, but he's just so dang cute we love him anyways (it helps that we wear gloves when feeding him during training sessions).



This one makes it painfully clear just how large the shawl is. When I wear it I keep thinking it probably hangs to barely the middle of my shoulder blades. Of course it looks much smaller when I wrap it around my neck like a scarf. This does not show it off to best advantage, however it is lovely and warm.

Project Spectrum - Late Start

So it being March 19th, it seems to me like I'm getting a bit of a late start to the whole posting about Project Spectrum thing.

I have a new button for it. It's over there in my sidebar. The rainbow background is hand carded wool from the Weaving Works.



At some point it will probably get spun up into a very small skein of yarn. I'm going to navajo ply it so the colors stay distinct, but since I'm expecting to get less than 30 yards of yarn out of this exercise, I have absolutely no idea what to do with it after that point.

The day I carded that spectrum, I did a couple others. One of them has already been spun, and I have no idea where it is. The other one I gave to Peacock and she spun at some point last week.



Hers is a bit muddier than mine because instead of using separate commercially dyed colors for each stop on the color wheel, I used 3 colors of wool to blend the entire rainbow. In both the fluff and the yarn, the bright yellow overpowers both the magenta and the turquoise. Now that I think about it the 3rd full set, the one I already spun was probably also blended colors composed of red, yellow and blue. If I recall correctly the purple in that set was downright brownish.

Blogiversary

Eeek!
I missed my very first blogiversary...
Bother.
I had plans to have another contest with more prizes, but I was convinced that I started this lovely little journal at the end of March.
Turns out I was wrong. I started it at the beginning of the month.
Having lasted a year with erratic semi-regular updates, this is officially my longest lived journal ever. The prior record was one that I kept almost daily during the summer I was working in Yosemite National Park. It lasted all of one entry after I got back to school in the fall.
I desperately hope that this blog survives my move to pharmacy school at the end of the summer. I suspect that posts will become much less frequent, but as I have no intentions of ceasing to knit, I will likely hopefully continue to document them in this forum.

I've earned Pyrite

I got the sweater done in time to wear it to the birthday dinner last night. I have no photos... but I did get compliments.

I am quite pleased with the fit and look, even though I can't wear it over anything more than a tank top. The neckline is slightly fussy as it's very straight across the front and back and tends to curl, but I like the effect over all. It looks rather like a faire bodice with relatively narrow shoulders set very wide on the shoulders.

Makes me wish I'd sewn it together years ago instead of letting my worries that it couldn't possibly fit stop me. I'd heard that Debbie Bliss' patterns ran small right about the time I finished the knitting and I was more interested in keeping it a UFO than I was having it fail completely... bother!

After dinner the sweater got ooh-ed and aah-ed over by two of the cutest little kids ever. The elder one is just beginning to knit and they both were quite impressed. The littler one asked about making it in some detail so I explained knitting the pieces flat, sewing them all together and crochetting the edging on afterwards.

Photographic proof to follow when I have the time to get a picture.

Olympic Pyrite

A rather opaque title, I realize, however I find it amusing.

My Scoop Neck Cardigan was my project for the UFOlympics. I did not get it completely finished before the end of the olympics, I did, however put it into a sweater shaped conglomeration of parts and Natalie was kind enough to award me a bronze medal for climbing over the psychological hump that's been keeping me from finishing this sweater for the last few years.

At this point I am competing for a Fools Gold (or pyrite) medal. I started my olympic work on this project on February 19th. If I finish it completely by this Tuesday, March 7th, I will have completed it in 16 days, just not the right 16 days...

I have all the seaming done, have completed the crochetted edgings, and have the first (of 9) buttons attached. This should be completely do-able. Now I just need to do it! Maybe I'll get it done in time to wear it to a friend's birthday dinner.

Yummy... sushi... I'm pleased, my roomates, not so much... they'll be having teriyaki

Experimental Intarsia

If you've been following this blog, you know that I have never before mentioned intarsia, except perhaps in a list of techniques I've never tried.

This would, by most standards make me an odd choice as a source for advice. It does not stop me from having an opinion, so when a friend at Knit'n'Knuth asked me for help figuring out how do create intarsia with shaping around the edges I was more than happy to take on the challenge.

The request: To make an argyle pattern that looks like the diamonds grow from the fabric rather than being flat patches of color.

The solution: To start the diamond with a triple increase and then place paired increases and decreases along the edges of the diamonds.

The end results:



Not my knitting, but he said pretty much followed the chart I drafted after a bit of swatching.
They look much more like leaves than I was expecting, but when the accent lines are put in with duplicate stitch, the intended effect will be obvious.
As to the pattern itself, it's a top down raglan that's been converted to flat knitting so the intarsia could be added. The yarn is a lovely alpaca blend knit loosely so the finished product will be wearable indoors. There will be one set of three diamonds down the sleeves and another set down the front of the sweater. It's a fun design and will look wonderful on the knitter.

We can't currently find the chart I wrote out. When it is found I'll append an image to this post. It's the first chart I've drafted and I'm thrilled it's working out so well.