Mikknit

I received a package from my Secret Pal yesterday, and I’m so excited about it! She sent me so much stuff, and this is just the first package she says she’s sending! :-0

First of all, we have some gorgeous yarny goodness:

Two skeins of yarn spun from the loom waste from sari weaving. I haven’t a clue what to do with it, other than fondle it and be amazed by the beauty. Then there are three balls of Fantasia Ski Yarns Calliope. There’s 105m per ball, so I’ve got enough to do… something. Any suggestions?

Then, we have the goodies:

Black coffee-flavored candies, Cafe Latte Kit Kat, a Nestle Aero bar, “Coffee Sugar”, a Russell Stover Valentine’s Day box, and a couple candles - Sage Citrus and Apple. I guess I forgot to mention that I boycott Nestle, but it’s all good. I’m not so uptight that I can’t eat something of theirs that someone else has paid for. I’m a militant breastfeeder, but I’m also a chocolate lover. :-/

Notice the Japanese characters on the yarn and candies. Hmm… So I’m going to guess that my Secret Pal is on Okinawa from that and her hints. Let me know if I’m right, Whirl

I’m hoping to have some FO’s to post later, we’ll see if the kids cooperate and go to bed early.

I’ve been sitting on these pictures for a few days - I had to get new batteries for the camera so I could free the pictures, then I had to find the cable, upload them to my site, blah blah blah. So here they are -

This is Grace’s Robin Hood Jacket, photographed almost two weeks ago. I still haven’t found the buttons and haven’t had the chance to go get more, so there it sits. I’m going to call the shop now, actually, and see if they have more of the same buttons. Okay, they’re looking. Cross your fingers! Hooray, they had more!

This is the best picture I could get of Arlo in the black soaker. Black item + nonstop baby = bad pictures. Sorry. Grace was trying to hold him still. Obviously, it wasn’t working well.

This is the same soaker pattern in a different yarn. When I took this, I still had about 20 rows of ribbing to do, then to graft the ribbing to the live stitches on the front. Then it needs single crochet around the leg holes and knit gussets. About 1/2 hour of work after the knitting is done. It is currently waiting to be grafted. Maybe I’ll get to do that tonight, after the kids are in bed. Trying to graft (or knit anything, lately) with the kids around, even one of the kids, is a recipe for chaos. No fun.

I’ve finally found charcoal sock yarn for the heels and toes of Chris’s socks! I knit one heel last night, a short row heel, and then knit another 1″ or so on the foot of the sock before giving it to him to try on. Of course, the short row heel is too tight across his instep, so I had to pull it out and am now starting a flap heel. I *hate* flap heels! But if it fits his foot, it’s all good. Someday, these socks will be done!

Time to get off the computer now. Hopefully I can get lots of knitting done this weekend!

Knitting ribbing after almost two glasses of beer (Chris’s homebrewed Scottish Ale) is not so easy, especially with a slippery 16″ needle.

I’m working on the crotch of another soaker for Arlo, this one in Kraemer Yarns’ Naturally Nazareth, in the Autumn colorway. I’m having some gauge issues with this stuff. It’s labeled as an Aran weight, and I got a gauge of 4.5 sts/in on a #5, but when I started with the numbers for the heavier-weight soaker, I ended up with a gauge of 5.5 sts/in. Now I see 5 sts/in, which would be too big for him. I suppose I’ll put it on him before I completely finish it and see if it needs to go to the frog pond.

I swatched for a sweater for Grace today - eye-scorchingly bright pink Brown Sheep NatureSpun that she chose herself. She is not a wallflower! I think it’s going to be a raglan pullover with a picot hem & cuffs. I’m not sure if I’ll be knitting it in the round or flat. If I knit it flat, I may do a few intarsia hearts (or something else) to jazz it up - I’ve got some other similarly lurid colors of NatureSpun laying about that could be used.

I suppose that if I attempted the intarsia I could use that as a project for the Knitting Olympics. Knitting it in the round would just be sandbagging. Not that I couldn’t use some sandbags in my life…

It is widely known, at least by my husband, select friends and LYS owners, that I loathe intarsia. For me to consider doing intarsia is big. I’ve done one project in intarsia - this was four years ago and I’m still annoyed by it. Or maybe I’m just annoyed by the repair job I had to do on that one - one of my cats ate a few holes in the sweater while it was drying. Who knows, but it turned our damned cute.

Okay. Drinking beer #3 here and typing is getting tough. I’d better pack it in. Pictures tomorrow, I promise! I finally got batteries for the camera!

Well, sort of, anyhow. After my whiny, self-absorbed post the other day, I finally sucked it up and dove into finding my mistake on the shawl after the kids went to bed. I ended up tinking back two rows (at 320 or stitches/row, that took a while) and found that I’d managed to drop a YO at the beginning of a row. I probably dropped the first YO of row 155 while starting row 157, or maybe 159, I don’t know. Regardless of when I dropped it, I fixed it and am now midway through row 158, which I had to abandon because of a crying baby. I didn’t get a chance to work on it at all yesterday, since I conked out putting the kids to bed, but maybe today.

I also have a lead on some charcoal sock yarn (finally!) - my friend Josie suggested that I call her local LYS (All About Yarn in Coon Rapids, MN). Well, I called them and they’d just gotten a shipment of sock yarn in. And yes, there was charcoal yarn in there! *Choir of angels sings* Well, now we’ve got to set up a playdate for the kids and a yarn date for us, so I can go visit and get back to work on Chris’s socks. And now I can stop bitching about the damned charcoal sock yarn.

Grace is begging me to play Snood, so I’d better finish up here. I got batteries for the camera, so I hope to get some pictures posted soon.

I am in such a funk right now - nothing I have started is appealing.

Here’s what’s on the needles and/or in need of finishing work:

• Grace’s Robin Hood Jacket needs to be sewn up (one sleeve is on and sewn up, just needs the side sewn and the other sleeve on and sewn) It’d take me an hour, but I can’t bring myself to do it since I can’t find the stupid buttons and I want to do all of the finishing in one sitting.

• Arlo’s black soaker just needs crochet trim around the legs and the gussets picked up & knit. A 20 minute project but I don’t want to do it. The black yarn does nothing for me when I’m already in a dark mood.

• I started a new soaker for Arlo in some variegated aran weight yarn that’s just gorgeous, but it doesn’t have much give to it. I’m almost through the ribbing but not quite. I’ll need some uninterrupted time to do the increases after the ribbing and I won’t get any of that until tonight.

• I have my Peace Shawl that I really want to work on, but there’s a mistake back a few rows. I don’t know where I am in the pattern because a certain small child took off with my row counter (about 18 months ago, I think), so I’m going to need a couple of hours to count stitches, tink back, count stitches, tink, etc.

I thought I’d have some time today to go hide at the coffee shop or yarn shop and work on it, but my mom decided that she wanted to head up to see my dad today instead of tomorrow. This is probably for the best, since it’s supposed to start snowing again shortly. So since I’d planned to work on it today, I found the shawl pattern and got myself all excited about working on it, and then all of a sudden I have no plans for the rest of the day and nothing to work on. I could pop in a movie for Grace and put Arlo to bed, but she won’t sit still and leave me alone for an hour and Arlo won’t stay asleep (assuming he’ll go to sleep in the first place).

So here I sit, feeling sorry for myself and wishing for an escape. Man, I hate winter.

I was taking photos of the Robin Hood Jacket (in the final stages of construction) and mugging for the camera to show off my new hat, and the batteries in the camera died. How the heck can we have no AA batteries in the house, and where are the dang rechargeables?

Blah.

Maybe I’ll get the sweater sewn together and figure out where I put the buttons today, and post a modeling picture later.

I’m working on a soaker for Arlo in black Cascade 220 (the Little Turtle Knits Hybrid Rib) . I can’t just leave it black - it’s begging for some sort of embellishment. The obvious thing would be The Jolly Roger, and he can be Arrrrrrlo, but I’m thinking about other things too. I wasn’t planning to do black, I have a skein of red up in the stash room that I was looking for, but then out jumped the black. I’ll do the red one next! We need more soakers, since there’s only one that isn’t purple or a girly multicolor. Ah, the poor second child - getting his sister’s hand-me-downs even when they’re very girly. I’ll just choose to say that I’m teaching him to be secure in his masculinity.

Maybe I’ll go knit a few rounds on the soaker before the boy wakes up. Hopefully Grace can keep from knocking things over here - she’s playing with the cats with a feather toy. Whoops, I hear a baby upstairs. Darnit!

I’m in the middle of Yarn Harlot: The Secret Life of a Knitter, by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee - The Yarn Harlot herself. It’s a very enjoyable book so far. Many of the stories I remember from her blog, but there are a lot of new ones too.

One of the ones I read last night caused me to bawl my eyes out, though. Yes, the Yarn Harlot made me cry. The story “One Little Sock” was what did it - she was the doula for a woman whose baby died in utero, probably while she was in labor. I was lying in bed next to my sweet little boy and once I set the book down I scooped him up in my arms and just held him and cried. I feel lucky to have my children every day, but a story like that reinforces how lucky I am. Arlo had a true knot in his cord, so it’s possible that things could’ve gone a very different way than they did. I shudder to think about it.

While doing my Amazon search for The Yarn Harlot’s book, I see that they have the info posted for her next book - Knitting Rules!: The Yarn Harlot’s Bag of Tricks. Should be another entertaining book!

There is some knitting going on around here - I’m making slow but steady progress on the hood of Grace’s Robin Hood Jacket (seed stitch. Miles and miles of seed stitch) and also a hat for myself out of some Malabrigo Selección Privada. I cannot find a picture of it online and Photobucket isn’t cooperating with me this week, so I won’t share right now. Hopefully I can take an in-progress photo tomorrow to share. It’s looking like I may need to frog it - I guessed at both the gauge and my head circumference… never a good thing. It’s looking to be around 19″ around instead of the maybe 21.5″ I need to fit my 22.5″ noggin. Curse my big head!

Ah well, knitting is as much about the process as the final product for me!

1. Are you a yarn snob (do you prefer higher quality and/or natural fibers)? Do you avoid Red Heart and Lion Brand?
Yes, I am a yarn snob in that I prefer yarns with a high natural fiber content - fake fibers make my hands hurt.

2. Do you spin? Crochet?
Yes to both, though my crocheting is mostly incidental to knitting these days.

3. What do you use to store your needles/hooks in?
My WIPs, generally But I have a DPN holder and a circular needle holder from Circular Solutions that suffice. The DPN holder tends to disgorge its contents at times, and the circular holder looks really messy.

4. How long have you been knitting? Would you consider your skill level to be beginner, intermediate or advanced?
I’ve been knitting seriously for about five years, but I learned when I was in elementary school. I consider my skill level to be advanced, but I don’t really do much advanced stuff.

5. Do you have an Amazon or other online wish list?
Yep! Please contact me for details.

6. What’s your favorite scent? (for candles, bath products etc.)
Citrus, especially grapefruit; mint. I do not burn candles - candles + small kids and cats = bad idea

7. Do you have a sweet tooth? Favorite candy?
Oh yeah. Chocolate, especially the Daim candies you can get at IKEA. Or cookies - chocolate chip cookies. Just NO COCONUT!

8. What other crafts or Do-It-Yourself things do you like to do?
I sew and we’re doing all sorts of DIY home-improvement projects here.

9. What kind of music do you like? Can your computer/stereo play MP3s? (if your buddy wants to make you a CD)
I suppose my default category would be “alternative” - pretty much anything played on Minnesota Public Radio’s The Current (see http://mpr.org) is good. I also love bluegrass and classical music. Yes, my computer and stereo can handle MP3s.

10. What’s your favorite color? Or–do you have a color family/season/palette you prefer? Any colors you just can’t stand?
I love green, orange, and red - fairly dark/bright, though lime green and blaze orange are not desired. I also wear brown and black a fair bit. I don’t like to wear blues, purples, and white - they just don’t suit my coloring or my stain-hiding needs.

11. What is your family situation? Do you have any pets?
Married with two kids (almost 3 and 9 months), we have five cats. Yes, I am the crazy cat lady.

12. Do you wear scarves, hats, mittens or ponchos?
Yes, yes, yes, oh god no

13. What is/are your favorite yarn/s to knit with?
Pretty much any sock yarn, any 100% wool, wool/alpaca blend. I’m fairly easy to please, as long as it’s a smooth yarn - no bumpy or eyelashy stuff!

14. What fibers do you absolutely *not* like?
Manmade fibers in high concentrations, cotton… anything that doesn’t have much give.

15. What is/are your current knitting obsession/s?
Socks, cables, and lace, and any combination of the above.

16. What is/are your favorite item/s to knit?
Socks, wool soakers (diaper covers), heavily cabled sweaters

17. What are you knitting right now?
The Robin Hood Jacket, at least one sock (I lose track sometimes), and that’s it? Wow.

18. Do you like to receive handmade gifts?
Absolutely!

19. Do you prefer straight or circular needles?
Circular

20. Bamboo, aluminum, plastic?
Addi Turbos or bamboo

21. Do you own a yarn winder and/or swift?
Yes to both

22. How did you learn to knit?
My mom taught me the basics, everything else I taught myself.

23. How old is your oldest UFO?
5 years or so

24. What is your favorite animated character or a favorite animal/bird?
I must have a favorite animated character, but I’ll be damned if I can think of one. I do like cats an awful lot, as well as rabbits.

25. Favorite holiday?
Thanksgiving

26. Is there anything that you collect?
Cats, apparently. That and dust. And wool. Oh, and antique patent medicine bottles.

27. What knitting magazine subscriptions do you have?
None

28. Any books, yarns, needles or patterns out there you are dying to get your hands on?
Fleece artist yarn, I’d like to try out the Bryspun circulars, and Charlene Schurch’s new sock book.

29. Are there any new techniques you’d like to learn?
Not really

30. Are you a sock knitter? What are your foot measurements?
Yes! My feet are 10″ long, 10″ around.

31. When is your birthday? (mm/dd)
May 26

I have been knitting, there just hasn’t been much time/energy/interest in posting about it. We’re finally getting back into the swing of things now that Chris has gone back to work, but I’m still mostly in read mode rather than write mode.

I got a decent amount of knitting done over our Christmas travels and this past week. First:

That’s the back and left front of Grace’s Robin Hood Jacket. I’m almost to the neckline decreases on the right front but was only about 1.5″ in when I took this picture on Monday. The yarn is lovely and this particular color was well worth the wait - it’s going to be spectacular on her!

The picture of the sweater could be better, but this is what I had to contend with as I was trying to take a picture:

That’s Max. He’s the center of the universe, dontchaknow.

Next, a sock for Chris:

The main yarn is Trekking XXL that I got on sale at Black Purl in Wausau. I figured I should do contrasting heels and toes since he’s got big feet (size 13, 11″ around) and I don’t want to run out of yarn. I must’ve been looking at my work in the dark when I decided to get black for the heels and toes - as you can see, it doesn’t quite match. I went back to my friendly neighborhood yarn shop to get charcoal and they didn’t have it, so I went to another yarn shop and found a dark grey which turned out not to match either. I’ll have to drag the kids out to yet another yarn shop sometime this week in search of charcoal sock yarn. I’m sure they’ll be thrilled.