Rhymes with Orange

Did anyone else see this Sunday's Rhymes with Orange?

Here's a link.

You must go read it.

Sock Wars, Round Two

Got my Round Two socks in the mail the other day (the socks being knit by my target's target, I believe, or perhaps my target's target's target.)

I didn't feel much like working on them before, but last night I pulled them out and finished them off. There wasn't much work left to them - less thn half a foot and the toe. I got them finished last night (kitchenering at 1 am is NOT recommended) and hit the post office this morning to get them in the mail.

Still waiting for my sock to arrive in the mail - no idea when or if they're coming.

In an administrative note, can anyone out there who uses Blogger tell me how to get the e-mail notification to cough up e-mail addresses for my commenters? They show up in my inbox as being from "{noreply-comment@blogger.com}", and I can't reply to them. Some people, I can track back to their e-mails, but others I can't, and it's bothering me that I can't respond to comments people are leaving for me.

Wheelies!

I had great fun stumping my co-workers today with my current knitting project.

Too flat to be socks, too small to be clothing. They had no idea! (I'd make y'all guess, but I'm lame, and have no pictures.)

In the interest of using up some of the old stash, I'm making myself a wheelie. Now, since it's stash yarn, the colors are not really perfect for my car interior, but this is a totally fun knit. Easy enough to do in company, with juuuust enough pattern to keep it entertaining. And it's the instant gratification of a small knit, even if it's done on smallish needles with smallish yarn.

Eris continues. I've finished the collar, it seems to be the right size, I just have to sit down and power through picking up all the stitches around the edges. Perhaps that'll be the task for tomorrow evening at Circles, before we go out for dinner.

Sock Wars!

That might be the fastest I've ever knit a pair of socks. It helped that the gauge meant that these will really be more like bed socks than real everyday wear socks.

I was not helped by the fact that I forgot all about sock wars, until my assassin e-mailed me on Monday morning asking for my address. Oh crap! I forgot all about it! Thankfully, I had yarn in the stash that worked for the socks, and I was off and runnning.


Knit like a damn fool all week, and got these off in the mail juuuuust before the post office closed for the night on Friday evening. Just checked my tracking number, and saw they'd been delivered this afternoon.

No sign of my socks yet, but I'm expecting to be toast any moment now.

Details:

Pattern is yarnmonkey's sock wars pattern (duh) found here.

Yarn is Cascade 220 (black) and Lorna's Laces Bullfrogs and Butterflies (Bittersweet) for the toes. I know the pattern called for DK weight, and I think the Cascade is technically worsted, but I didn't like the fabric I was getting at that gauge with the thinner yarn. Didn't seem like a good sock fabric. So, I found something I liked better that I was getting gauge with.

Complain, and the universe provides?

Hopefully, that's not really today's lesson.

After my whining a whole lot on Monday about knitting frustration, my lent out needles were returned to me when I wasn't expecting them to come home for a little while longer, and I was able to dive into knitting Eris. I am totally in love. These cables are beyond complicated, but it feels like just the kind of thing I need to get my knitting interest and joie de vivre back.

Something interesting and challenging, and not just knitting around and around and around.

And Suzanne, thank you for your generous offer!!!! I'll e-mail you to see if we can arrange something.

Time flies

Man, I go away on vacation, and when I come home, it's like I've forgotten all about the blog.

Which, of course not, but life gets in the way of computer frippery all too often I find.

Finished the "gamer's wrap" for my sweetie while on vacation, but I don't have pictures of it yet. I'd started it in the spring and abandoned it when it got hot. It was awfully nice to have on those chilly New Hampshire evenings, all piled in my lap with it's warm fuzzy goodness. I made it for him after catching him using my shawls to keep warm whileplaying computer gams in the middle of the night. His computer is in the coldest corner of the house, and he stays up late into the night, after we've set the thermostat to lower the heat (good for me, since I hate sleeping in a hot room), but at least now he has a crazy warm wrap to bundle up in.

Finished the peapod sweater and hat. Pleasantly surprised by only needing three balls of the Cashsoft to finish it, depsite being dead on for gauge.

I'm plodding through some socks as my take along project, and am almost, finally finished one.

I'm currently being stymied in my plans for starting new projects. One, I can't start because I lent the needles I need to a friend, and she's not returned them yet. I don't want to buy new needles in a size I don't use that often, just to do one small part of a sweater pattern.

The other, I think is going to make me insane. Needs both DPNs and circs in teeny sizes. I generally get rather different gauge on Addi's vs. bamboo, so I need to track down and find bamboo circs in itty bitty sizes, and hope I'm on gauge so I don't have to buy 17 pairs of needles. Add in that the pattern calls for metric sizes, and the bamboo circs I've been able to find seem to not exist in one of the sizes, is making me just a wee bit crazy. TWITCH. (I know, I need to just let it go and start swatching with wht I have on hand, and figure the rest out as it comes. I know this, and still, twitchy!)

More baby knits

This year has been a busy year for new babies within my circle of friends - we're up to four new babies, with at least two other couples actively trying to get pregnant. Lots of babies means, of course, lots of baby knits.

I knit a blanket, hat and bootie set for the newest of the new arrivals - my friend Carrie's new little girl Katherine. Katherine arrived last Saturday afternoon, and she is as beautiful and entirely enchanting as I expected her to be. Carrie and her husband William had decided to leave the baby's sex a surprise for the birth, and so we were aiming for genger neutral colors. I've held off posting pictures up here, but I'm hoping to deliver the gifts this afternoon, and I doubt Carrie's doing much blog reading at the moment.


The blanket is from a pattern in Knit Baby Blankets, which is a great collection of cute patterns. I used Kertzer Butterfly Super 10 mercerized cotton, which is a great baby yarn - soft as anything and entirely machine washable. The pattern used two balls of the yellow and orange, and a smidge more than a ball of the green.



The hat and booties were (obviously) knit from the same yarn. The booties are the Pirate Booties from 50 Baby Booties to Knit, and the hat I just made up by myself. It looks tinny in the picture, but the entire hat is a knit2 purl2 rib, and it stretches to about double the size you see here.

Next up is a project that's going to be an enormous challenge for me.

Anyone want to guess what, from the last two pictures?


Lots of different colors, eh?

















Does this help a little bit?














Lastly, two things. First, thank you for the words of condolence - I've passed them on to Wiley and he say thank you as well. Second, I loaded all my pictures from Georges Island up onto Flicker. If you want to see them, they're over here.

You can get a lot of knitting done on a 17 hour car ride

We spent this past weekend on an unexpected trip to western NY because my husband's grandmother passed away last week. She lied in a small town west of Buffalo, and it is a long, long drive to get there from Boston.

The trip was sad, but not overly so, and despite 17 hours in the car with Widget and Kate, my mother in law, I'm glad I went, to see many people I'll likely never see again and to say goodbye to Westfield, which, although not nearly as central to my life as to my husband's, was still a little place I'd come to really be enchanted by.

The other upside to the trip was, of course, the knitting time. When we left, I had a sleeve and a half done on the Pea Pod sweater. When we got back, I had this:



Nearly the entire sweater finished, as well as both sleeves. It needed about an hour's more work on the back, and I wove ends in last night. I'll block it tonight and hopefully start seaming it, and then I'll just need to knit the neckline and finish up the hat.

And a couple close-ups of the lace on the front:





This is a fantastic pattern. I'm knitting it with Rowan Cashsoft DK, which I am loving. It's come together so quickly that I think I'll make another for the newest new little girl in my life (more on that later).

Kate was in town through this morning, so we all decided to take a mental health day and headed out to George's Island (a trip we were supposed to make on Saturday for Wiley's company's summer outing). Kate lived in Boston for years and years, but doesn't get much chance for ocean enjoyment in Roswell, where she's lived for about 11 years now.

We thought a relaxing day on the harbor would be just what we all needed. We roamed all over the fort - Hannah's finally old enough to be really fascinated by all the nooks and crannies of the fort, and then settled in for a rest while we waited for the boat back. The best part was getting to sit and knit with this stunning view.

Flowerbasket shawl(s)

So, Suzanne over at Double Helix has been allll on my case to write about my Flowerbasket shawl(s). I have to pluralize it, because it's a pattern that I've knit three times over now.

There are two of them in this picture. A corner of mine, and a good view of my daughter wearing the one I made for her. She insists on wearing her shawl "inside out", with the reverse stockinette on the outside. While pretty, I don't think it shows the colors off to their best advantage. There are pictures of all three shawls on my Livejournal picture gallery, if you want to surf over and see them.

So, the stories of the shawls. The first one I made was for a gift for my grandmother in law. I had some beautiful fuzzy re-claimed angora blend yarn that I pulled out of a sweater for Goodwill. I desperately needed a good gift for Um-um one Christmas, and hit on the shawl as an answer. As a first lace pattern ever, it was challenging, but not impossible, especially since it's knit with non-laceweight yarn (a key for me on a first lace project attempt). It came out beautifully, if I may say so, myself. I thought that someday I might make one for myself, but with so many things out there to knit, I don't often re-knit patterns.

But then, last summer, I made plans to go visit my friend Carrie and her husband in Japan. Faced with more than 30 hours of flight and travel time, just to get there and back, I knew I needed a good project. It couldn't be too easy or I'd get bored. It couldn't be too big or too small (either too hard to carry, or I'd risk finishing it on the road). It couldn't be too tiny or too dark, since lighting might be an issue. I'd had this nifty hand-painted silk yarn in my stash for a while, and I decided that a lace shawl was just the thing for the yarn, and for the trip.

My goal was to try and start and finish the shawl on the trip, and if I'd not decided to add extra repeats at the end, I'd likely have done it. This shawl went to Tokyo, went to the Izu Peninsula, went to Mt. Fuji, went to the Tokyo Stitch and Bitch. It saw endless trains and busses and lockers as we roamed around Japan with no car. It even survived customs at LAX, which is something that I nearly didn't manage. LAX sucks rocks.

When I came home and blocked out the shawl, my daughter made her customaty request, whenever I knit anything. Momma, could you make one for me? I had a LOT of yarn left over. In fact, even after making her shawl, I have a lot of yarn left over - the incredible non-shrinking ball of yarn. I was feeling generous, and agreed to make one for her too. She loves it, and often asks to wear it with entirely inappropriate outfits. Best review I could ask for.

I find mine is just not quite the right size. Too small to be a proper shawl, too big to be worn like a scarf. I love it, though, and wear it anyway. Who cares if it looks a little silly?

So, that's the story of the flowerbasket shawl(s).

Little Fluffy Clouds

Has anyone else here ever heard the Orbital song "Little Fluffy Clouds"?

"What were the skies like when u were young? They went on for ever and they when I we lived in Arizona and the skies always had little fluffy clouds and ahh.. they were long and clear and there were lots of stars, at night."

The song's been stuck in my head for days, since reading the Yarn Harlot's description of her trip to the Southwest. Mmmm, the skies are one of many many reasons I want to live out in the desert someday.

Today, our skies are nearly as perfect as New Mexico sky; full of blue so bright it hurts to look at them and fluffly clouds just to make you see how bright the blue is.

Another lovely evening

Another lovely knitting circle hosted by Suzanne.

Once again, the food was delicious, the company delightful, and the kntting plentiful. H and her daughter hit it off well and spent time playing together.

But the highlight of the evening? Definitely the flinging of shrimp shells into K's knitting bag. Am I a genius, or what?

What interesting things have YOU done?

01. Bought everyone in the bar a drink
02. Swam with wild dolphins
03. Climbed a mountain
04. Taken a Ferrari for a test drive No, but I've ridden in one, could probably drive it if I asked nicely
05. Been inside the Great Pyramid
06. Held a tarantula
07. Taken a candlelit bath with someone
08. Said 'I love you' and meant it
09. Hugged a tree
10. Bungee jumped
11. Visited Paris
12. Watched a lightning storm at sea
13. Stayed up all night long and saw the sun rise
14. Seen the Northern Lights
15. Gone to a huge sports game define huge?
16. Walked the stairs to the top of the leaning Tower of Pisa
17. Grown and eaten your own vegetables
18. Touched an iceberg
19. Slept under the stars
20. Changed a baby's diaper HA ahahahahahaha. Hee.
21. Taken a trip in a hot air balloon
22. Watched a meteor shower
23. Gotten drunk on champagne
24. Given more than you can afford to charity
25. Looked up at the night sky through a telescope
26. Had an uncontrollable giggling fit at the worst possible moment
27. Had a food fight
28. Bet on a winning horse
29. Asked out a stranger
30. Had a snowball fight
31. Screamed as loudly as you possibly can
32. Held a lamb
33. Seen an eclipse
34. Ridden a roller coaster
35. Hit a home run only in wiffle ball
36. Danced like a fool and not cared who was looking
37. Adopted an accent for an entire day
38. Actually felt happy about your life, even for just a moment
39. Had two hard drives for your computer
40. Visited all 10 provinces or all 50 states
41. Taken care of someone who was drunk many times
42. Had amazing friends Still do!
43. Danced with a stranger in a foreign country
44. Watched wild whales
45. Stolen a sign
46. Backpacked in Europe
47. Taken a road-trip And have a tattoo to commemorate one of them
48. Gone rock climbing
49. Midnight walk on the beach
50. Gone sky diving
51. Visited Ireland
52. Been heartbroken longer then you were actually in love
53. In a restaurant, sat at a stranger's table and had a meal with them
54. Visited Japan
55. Milked a cow
56. Alphabetized your cds
57. Pretended to be a superhero
58. Sung karaoke
59. Lounged around in bed all day is it lounging if you've just given birth?
60. Posed nude in front of strangers
61. Gone scuba diving
62. Kissed in the rain
63. Played in the mud
64. Played in the rain
65. Gone to a drive-in theater
66. Visited the Great Wall of China
67. Started a business
68. Fallen in love and not had your heart broken
69. Toured ancient sites
70. Taken a martial arts class
71. Played D&D for 6 hours straight
72. Gotten married
73. Been in a movie
74. Crashed a party
75. Gotten divorced
76. Gone without food for 5 days
77. Made cookies from scratch
78. Won first prize in a costume contest
79. Ridden a gondola in Venice
80. Gotten a tattoo
81. Rafted the Snake Dead River
82. Been on television news programs as an "expert"
83. Got flowers for no reason
84. Performed on stage Do grade school plays count?
85. Been to Las Vegas
86. Recorded music
87. Eaten shark
88. Had a one-night stand
89. Gone to Thailand
90. Bought a house
91. Been in a combat zone
92. Buried one of your parents
93. Been on a cruise ship
94. Spoken more than one language fluently
95. Performed in aisles at Rocky Horror.
96. Raised children. well, not in the past tense yet
97. Followed your favorite band/singer on tour
98. Created and named your own constellation of stars
99. Taken an exotic bicycle tour in a foreign country
100. Picked up and moved to another city to just start over
101. Walked the Golden Gate Bridge
102. Sang loudly in the car, and didn't stop when you knew someone was looking
103. Had plastic surgery
104. Survived an illness that you shouldn't have survived
105. Wrote articles for a large publication
106. Lost over 100 pounds
107. Held someone while they were having a flashback
108. Piloted an airplane
109. Petted a stingray
110. Broken someone's heart
111. Helped an animal give birth
112. Won money on a T.V. game show
113. Broken a bone
114. Gone on an African photo safari
115. Had a body part of yours below the neck pierced
116. Fired a rifle, shotgun, or pistol I want to, though
117. Eaten mushrooms that were gathered in the wild
118. Ridden a horse
119. Had major surgery
120. Had a snake as a pet He lives in my bedroom
121. Hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon
122. Slept for more than 30 hours over the course of 48 hours
123. Visited more foreign countries than U.S. states
124. Visited all 7 continents
125. Taken a canoe trip that lasted more than 2 days
126. Eaten kangaroo meat
127. Eaten sushi For BREAKFAST
128. Had your picture in the newspaper
129. Changed someone's mind about something you care deeply about
130. Gone back to school
131. Parasailed
132. Petted a cockroach
133. Eaten fried green tomatoes
134. Read The Iliad - and the Odyssey
135. Selected one "important" author who you missed in school, and read More than once
136. Killed and prepared an animal for eating
137. Skipped all your school reunions But maybe this year
138. Communicated with someone without sharing a common spoken language Well, communicated might be a stretch
139. Been elected to public office
140. Written your own computer language
141. Thought to yourself that you're living your dream
142. Had to put someone you love into hospice care
143. Built your own PC from parts
144. Sold your own artwork to someone who didn't know you
145. Had a booth at a street fair
146: Dyed your hair
147: Been a DJ
148: Shaved your head
149: Caused a car accident
150: Saved someone's life

Meet Pye

Pye is one of our three cats. She's adorable, sweet-tempered and only sometimes really crazy.

She's also probably the cat that is closest to being a kindred spirit, because, you see...


Pye has a yarn fetish that rivals even my own.

Not to knit with, of course, since her lack of opposable thumbs would make that a bit difficult. No, she likes to make yarn nests. In the middle of our very small upstairs hallway. If there's yarn to found anywhere in the house, I'll come home to find it all piled in the hallway at the top of the stairs. She doesn't even discriminate between fibers! Her love for nasty acrylic seems as boundless as her love for my beautiful hand-dyed wools. All piled together in harmony.

I've lost any ability to leave yarn out anywhere in the house. She has an incredible yarn seeker sense, and seems to be able to find it in any hiding place. So, most of my yarn has been restrained and crated into locking plastic tubs.

She stands in front of them and cries at me.

Silly cat.

Back home now

One photo so far, of the sky and water Saturday night. This was our view as we waited for our table.


Returned from Newport yesterday afternoon. Glad to be home, sad to be home, a little bit of both.

As predicted, we ate well, we drank well. We walked ourselves stupid doing (most of) the cliff walk, touring fancy houses and shopping. We got pedicures, and I bought cute shoes.

Knitting? I re-knit the heel of my sock 4 times, because I just could not get it right. So while there was a great deal of knitting, there was very little knitting progress accomplished.

You know you're a knitter

when figuring out what *project(s)* to pack for a long weekend trip consumes more brain time than what clothes to pack.

Going away tomorrow for a long weekend to Newport with my dear friend S. Shoes will be bought, fancy houses will be toured, good food will be eaten and a lot of wine will be drunk.

This is going to be GREAT!

New camera!

Hip hip hooray!

My new camera arrived today!

To celebrate, two pictures:

First, a Tuesday sky, since I missed Saturday. All around Boston today are thunderstorms. Yet, even though I can hear thunder off in the distance, you'd not know it to look out my back door. Clear skies, little puffy clouds.

After that, a peek at one of my current WIPs - stripey socks in grey and pink. The yarn is Shelridge Farms, the pattern is just a basic toe-up sock. Love the yarn, love the colors.

Bad Saturday Sky-er

Signed up to join Saturday Sky the other day, but my camera hasn't arrived yet, so no pictures for me. The old camera remains entirely among the missing. And next week, going out of town for the weekend. Bad Siercia.

Thanks to Rebecca and Suzanne for their compliments about the corset. It is beautiful, pattern issues notwithstanding. And yes, Suzanne, you are correct that patterns fail people all the time, in numerous dimensions. While I'm getting more and more adept at spotting pattern issues coming, and at tinkering with them to make them fit me, I wish we could see more discussion about how to adjust patterns within the patterns themselves - especially ones with tricky construction or exacting measurement standards.

Might as well wish for the moon, eh?

Finished the baby blanket today while I was covering the office for the Fourth. Started some baby booties to go with, but quickly decided that I didn't have enough of the yellow that I needed (which maybe I did, but didn't want to get almost to the end to find out I was wrong). So, pulled those out, and will start with plan B for the booties later tonight. Hopefully there's enough left for a little hat too. Perhaps I should do the hat first - that's probably a more useful accessory.

Sorry for no pictures yet, but between my camera going missing and the seekrit - gifty nature of the current project, there are no pictures as of yet.

Learning something new

The current seekrit project has edging of a type I've not knit before - a folded over hem.

(Well, the pattern gives options for a garter border with picot cast off, or for a folded picot edge, which I think is so much prettier that even though it's way more work, that was what I decided I simply had to have.)

Having never worked one of these edges before, I spent most of my evening tonight fiddling with the best method to "sew" the edge down.

I tried whipstitching, as illustrated in Wiseman's Knitter's Book of Finishing Techniques. Didn't like it.

I tried a bastardized Kitchner stitch, using the picked up loops. Didn't like it, and WAY too fiddle-y for the size of this project (Kitchnering a sock toe? No problem. Kitchnering 600+ edging stitches? Not on your fricking life.)

Finally, I tried scooping up the picked-up loop and working a modified three needle bind-off with it and the live loop. I'm pretty darn pleased with the result.

Now to do the remaining 450+ stitches.

The accursed corset?

So, Circles, my local-ish yarn shop has been looking for sample knitters. You knit a sample, you earn yarn dollars, essentially a store credit. Now, I'm lucky, and my yarn budget is... generous, and my time budget is generally not at all, so I'd figured I would leave most of the sample knitting to others who had more need of earning store credits, or who had enough free time to make it more worth it for them.

But then, Allison mentioned that she was looking for someone to knit Annie Modesitt's silk corset pattern. I was entranced. I thought the pattern was gorgeous, and the Regal silk yarn was so sumptuous (and really, outside even my budget), but as a rather plus size woman, I wasn't up for knitting it for myself.

Happy to have the chance to work the pattern, I jumped at the chance to knit the sample. What a mistake that was. I still think the pattern is beautiful, truly lovel, but I have never had such an awful experience knitting anything before, ever.

First off, I should have realized I wasn't going to like the yarn. I have rough hands. Softly spun silk + rough hands = misery in knitting. Constantly feeling like I was snagging the yarn on my very fingertips was awful. I felt like it even made the yarn start to pill when the piece was still being knit, all because I was creating all these tiny snags. The colors? Stunning. The sheen? Divine. While I'm sure I'll still ooooh and aaaaah over the new skeins that come into the shop, I now know that I never ever want to knit with it again, ever.

Second, the pattern. I struggled in numerous way with the pattern. First off, I STILL don't understand how the math of the pattern works. With the listed gauge, and the given stitch counts, I'm really not sure how you were supposed to end up with the desired finished measurements. I knit about halfway through, hinking to myself that it looked too small, but deluding myself in that way that we knitters do, that it would be okay, that I had to trust the pattern, that I just wasn't used to knitting for a non-plus-sized pattern. When I realized that the corset would be only the slightest bit loose on my five year old daughter, I couldn't ignore the truth of it any more. I tried it on a shop mannequin, and it was a joke.

Ripped the entire thing out, and started over again, two sizes larger.

(I have to be honest here and admit that a part of my frustration over the pattern is that, as a plus size, I was really pleased to see a pattern for a beautiful, fitted, sexy top that came in a size large enough that even I could wear it. When I started figuring out the math of it, and realizing that there was no way the largest size would actually fit me, I felt betrayed, even if I don't think it's a top I would ever make for myself.)

There were a bunch of little things that bugged me. I think it's because somehow, I'd simply come to expect more from the way the pattern was written. I'm not sure why that is, although perhaps because I perceive Annie Modesitt to be such a respected designer that her stuff had to be better than I found it to be.

Aside from the sizing issues, things I would have wanted to find in the pattern, but didn't, include:

• Actual instructions that the i-cord bind off and cast on were recommended for the armholes. It wasn't until my second time through the pattern that I figured out why she had the directions for those on the pattern at all. I still wasn't sure that was where I was supposed to use them, but I guessed at it.
• An acknowledgement in the pattern shapping that different size women would need the bust decreases in a subtly different spot - the pattern had the decreases at the same distance from the edges of the corset for all sizes. I know from experience that if you want the decreases to fall under the center of each breast, that you need to gradually move them wider as your sizes go out. This pattern didn't do that.
• Some discussion of height and measurements, and how that might affect where you do things like start decreasing - A, who is our "model" for a lot of the samples is a tall woman, and when all was said and done, although the model looks perfect on the shop sample, it looks terrible on her. Despite the fact that I planned (a bit) for her height and made the corset a bit longer before starting the decreases, they still start above her chest. Similarly, as short and fat, I don't like that this pattern assumed that lengths must increse as width does. That bothers me with lots of patterns, but for something this fitted and precise, I really wished that there had been more discussion about how to custom fit it to your own shape.

• I realize this is a personal preference thing, but I did not like the way she did her lace charts. I found them wildly confusing and hard to read.

When I "finished" the project, I brought it in to a fitting. Despite already being longer than the pattern called for, it was FAR too short for A, and short even on the mannequins. So, I had to go back and add even more length onto the damn thing. Then, I get all the buttons sewn onto it, and we found that they just popped open if you breathed on them. So, I had to pull them all off and re-do with larger buttons.

Overall, I've never been so glad to see the tail end of a project in my whole entire life.

But, in the interest of fairness, I should point out that on the mannequin, this piece os gorgeous. One of the prettiest things I have knit.

Knitting for others

This has been a long dry season of very little knitting for myself.

There was the seekrit ninja project for one friend. There was the baby poncho. Then the kid's poncho for H's school auction. Then a baby blanket. Now, another baby gift (seekrit ninja project #2, for at least a few more weeks). And the other half of the baby gift. And the blanket / wrap for my darling non-sweater wearing husband. And how could I forget the accursed corset for the shop?

Meanwhile, yarn I bought for me! me! me! languishes on the shelf of my closet, feeling lonely and abandoned. Lovely Oak Grove boucle in midnight blues and purples that cries to be made into a shawl. Gorgeous red cashmere patiently waiting to be a sweater. Grey merino from Margaret's farm that has been abandoned since last summer.

Soon, my pretties. Soon the gift knitting will be finished, and we will be re-united.

Christmas? What's Christmas?

This is going to be a departure for me.

I've long kept a LiveJournal, but have decided that I want someplace to gather all my knitting related detritus that I didn't have to keep locked to friends-only so as to avoid boring all my non-knitting friends.

Plus, I find that LJ and the blogging world are distinct enough from one another that I'm not making the same connections with the rest of the knitting world that I could be with a "real" blog of my own.

So, the start of an experiment.

You might wonder about the title of the blog (or perhaps not, since you're all likely to be knitters too). For most of my life, I've been fairly quiet and shy, tending towards to outer edges of the circles that I'm a part of. Most often, I'm the one found in the quiet corner, working on my projects. For a long time, those were cross-stitch and embroidery, now most of the time, they're knitting instead. In a lot of my social sphere where people don't know me all that well, "that girl who knits" is how a lot of people know me. The only exception to that is when they know my daughter, and then I'm universally known as H's mom. Either way, both are fair descriptors, and seemed an obvious choice for this space.