Baby Sweaters are Yellow

I've already written this post once today. Please forgive me if it's not as interesting the second time around.

I started this project spectrum baby sweater a day early. I'll not be finishing it during April. It knit up so quickly, I thought I'd easily finish it by mid month. This is just over a week's worth of progress.



Unfortunately, it spent the last three weeks being ignored.
The reason it got sent to the corner of the knitting basket and ignored?
It's neckline.



I got this far into it and realized that the neckline as called for in the pattern would drive me batty with its asymetry and curling outward.
(Please ignore the tension oddites in the decreases on either side of the neck, they are my own doing and therefore I do not feel entitled to complain about them)

Confident that I would not have chosen a pattern destined to annoy me like this, I was angry that the model photographed in the book did not share the same annoying characteristics.
Then I looked at the picture again.



See? The model does almost exactly the same thing as my sweater.
Bother. At this point I decided to set the sweater aside and pretend it didn't exist. I like to let projects sit for a while while I decide whether I really want to rip them all the way back out and start over with a new pattern..

Then about a week ago, I mentioned my frustration to a coworker and she suggested putting a row of single crochet around the edges of the neckline.
Crochet seems like a perfect fix for my problem and has rescued the sweater from almost certain demise. I'll probably put a row around the bottom hem and sleeve cuffs just so the edges are finished the same way, but that shouldn't take very much time or yarn.

Now if I could just find the pattern book, I'd get started on the second half of the sweater...

Sockapaloooza Socks - Finished

Oh, frabjous day, calloo, callay...

My sockapaloooza socks are finished. As of this past Tuesday evening (a wonderful evening all around), my toes are both finished and all that remains is the weaving in of ends.

Huzzah!

On a slightly less happy note, I got an email saying that my sock pal needed to withdraw, and not to worry I had already been assigned an angel, so there would be socks coming to me soon.

Being reassured that I have an angel is wonderful, where I'm having problems is dealing with the realization that all the wonderful socks I've been lusting after for the last few months are, definitively and without a doubt, not mine...

Pout.

Chair Frames are Yellow

There was a knitting circle at Norwescon this year. It was not the lively stitch'n'bitch I'd hoped it would be, instead it was a gathering of about 8 women quietly working on their own projects in a room that was obviously set up for the standard panel at the front, audience facing them in rows type panel that is so prevalent at conventions everywhere.
I hope they have the knitting circle again next year and that more people show up for it. A bit more quiet social downtime would definitely add quite a bit to my con experience.



We didn't stay long as Peacock had spent too much time that day walking around on her injured knee. The next day she consented to being pushed about in the wheelchair for most of the day and did significantly better.

Dragons are Yellow

Easter weekend is when Norwescon happens.

At con I normally run into a gentleman that makes polymer clay dragons at least once. This year, I found him in the halls and he was selling dragons made of paper clay instead of polymer.



This little dragon climbed up onto my shoulder and looked at me. He was so smitten I just had to let him follow me home and take up residence in my fishbowl-mug.



I've forgotten the name of the stone he's holding in his tail.

The artist catches a unique personality with each of his miniature sculptures. This was true in the polymer clay and may be even more true with the paper clay. He said the new medium is allowing him to work larger than the polymer allowed and I'm really looking forward to seeing what he does with the larger pieces.

Sockapaloooza Socks

Almost finished..
Just the last little bits of the toes to knit and the ends to weave in and I will be ready to ship my socks out to their new home on May 2nd.
I really hope they fit.




As a break from my sock pal socks, I decided to make Peacock's pal a pair of baby socks when she decided that she needed another back-up plan. Since it's looking like she'll get her new pair completed in good time we're seriously thinking about keeping them as mementos rather than sending them off with their coordinating full-sized counterparts. Then again, maybe I should make a third one and we can each keep one...
The peacock, her sock pal and me (sung to the tune of 'the red queen, the white queen, and me' from Alice Through the Looking Glass)
So I spent some time knitting on these lovely little baby socklets. I think they're destined to be Christmas ornaments as I don't even have a teddy bear that could wear these.




They work up so quickly that I'm sorely tempted to make a whole slough of them for Christmas presents. However I'm reasonably sure that urge will pass quickly.

At Knit'n'Knuth last week we had our first mini-workshop. Peacock and I showed anyone who was interested how to make miniature socks. We figured this was the perfect introduction as they could be mostly completed in an evening rather than having a significant quantity of simple circular knitting before even starting turning the heel. So there've been a lot of baby socks being birthed around here lately.

Puppies are Yellow - Part II

And blue is a complement.
I suppose that would make the puppy orange, wouldn't it...

Here's the very tolerant puppy modeling my Leaf Lace Shawl.
I'm very glad he doesn't chew on things or drag them around the house, if he did I'd have to be much more careful where I put things down.



Isn't he cute?



I'm still wearing the shawl at least once a week. It's almost getting to where it's warm enough to wear the shawl and a sleeveless shirt outside with no jacket, and I'll probably keep wearing the shawl all year.

I've bought some solid green lorna's laces shepherd sock to make another one.



The current verdict: If wearing shawls and constantly knitting makes me look like a grandma, bring on the grandkids!

I realize there are some technical difficulties with that idea as one generally has to have kids and be over thirty (or sixty if your family spaces their generations like mine does), but I'm not worried, it'll all work out in the end. Maybe I'll just borrow somebody else's until I get some of my own...

Sock Yarn is Yellow

I got my Project Spectrum sock yarn exchange yarn in the mail from Karen.

I came home and saw a package sitting by the door. When I picked it up to see who it was addressed to, I almost had a heart attack.
My last name is exactly one letter different from one of my ex's and she misspelled it just right (fyi - mine starts with a 'z'). I didn't recognize the return address and was worried that he'd listed me as a relative for some unknown reason (This is not a completely unfounded fear, I got a call from a bank about a year back asking if I'd be a reference for the purposes of issuing him a loan. I politely refused).
The second option was that there was a type-o somewhere along the line and this was an exchange package, so I opened it up and found this:




The yarn is knitpicks dye-your-own, the dye is Kool-Aid
(I've misplaced the tag that said which colors were used)
I wound the hank into a ball and found the color striping wonderfully around the edges of the ball.




However, since the first ball was wound tighter than I enjoy working from, I re-wound it.
Look closely at the two pictures and absorb this lesson in how gauge affects the appearance of varegated yarn. The second picture is a lot more representative of how I hope the socks will look once they're knitted up. I like having all the colors mixed in with each other, in a wonderful mixed field of color.

Puppies are Yellow... ish

Hair and Changes

A week ago my hair looked like this:



And yes, that lovely sweater is the one that I finished earlier this spring as part of my UFOlympics. It's distinctly tardy, but I do have photographic proof that it exists.



I'm particularly fond of the stripes going different directions on the body and the arms. I'm not quite sure why as that is the one aspect of this sweater that I was distinctly worried about disliking while I was knitting it.

This is my hair now:



It is able to be laid down onto my head, but only with a fair bit of styling product and letting it dry while being squished flat by a headband....
A headband like my recently seamed panta. My only objection is that putting the ribbed panta on while my hair is wet results in slightly corrugated hair! I guess this means I need to make myself a stockinette panta-esque thingy...
I could just go buy a stretchy headband, but that would be too easy.



I like it!
It's really easy to care for, just wet, add goop with hands and let dry. The only thing I'm having trouble with is using enough goop. It seems to require twice as much as I think it ought to get it to mostly behave (like in this picture) and at least 4 to 6 times as much if I want it to pretend that it's straight and lay down behind my ears instead of poofing out around them.

Flowers are Yellow

To be precise, daffodils are yellow.



I even took this picture.
They're in the planting bed in our front yard that has a rather paltry crop of daffodils and tulips at the moment, but will be absolutely dripping in irises a bit later in the season.
Ooh, and the lovely carpet of grape hyacinth that we have at the moment isn't half bad either. (even though it's not yellow)

Contest - Flamingos are Pink

During March I posted a contest involving this picture:



I asked what the pink critters were and got a solid handful of correct responses.
Mary, Tracey, Vanessa, Laurie, and Trek all correctly supposed that they were flamingos.
Peacock took the picture when she was in Africa on a vacation a year or so before I met her, but was kind enough to share the picture with me.

Trek and Vanessa were the ones selected to win and will each be receiving a box of fluff in the mail.



This is one of them. Peacock carded it up for me out of mostly new zealand wool (we think it's correidale) with just a little bit of plastic glitz (probably not angelina, but pretty none-the-less).



Here's the other one, it's also mostly new zealand wool with a bit of plastic glitz, some angelina, and just a smidge of a merino silk blend added because it was a fabulous pink color. It's quite fascinating how much the merino silk blend changes the hand of the entire poof.

I'll leave who gets which one as a suprise for the recipients' mailboxes.
Thank you all for playing!

Baby Sweaters are Yellow

So it's April and in Project Spectrum land, that means yellow and orange are the colors to be working with.

Accordingly, I've started a baby sweater for a little one that is due in May (I think). I'm using the very first pattern in Erika Knight's Simple Knits for Cherished Babies (I don't remember the name of the pattern) and an extra vibrant yellow cotton yarn.



Can you see the piggy? It's not yellow, it was trying to defend me from the sheepies on the yarn's label. See ??



I'm not sure what it thought the sheepies were going to do to me but it was adamant that I needed protecting.

I actually started the sweater early because there was a K'n'B on Thursday evening for which I desperately wanted a new project. I'm more than halfway done with the front of the sweater and I definitely understand how one of my friends from college got addicted to knitting baby stuff. It's so fast... If I adult sweaters knitted up this quickly I'd go broke buying yarn and my house would overflow with handknitted garments.