flower scarf

After a "quiet week" that really wasn't (due to many meetings and many phone calls--it occurs to me that I spent a significant amount of time this week helping people from at least three different departments, not even counting payroll), I get Saturday off and then have to work on Sunday. Working on Sunday isn't all that unusual for me (it happens once every 8 weeks), but this time there will be a whole crew there helping out.

I think I've mentioned before that holidays aren't really a payroll specialist's friend...

• they mess up payroll schedules: next Friday would be our regular payday, but it happens to be a holiday--so payday will be Thursday instead, necessitating that we move our Monday/Tuesday processing to Sunday/Monday


• quite often we end up either working on the holiday or working on the weekend so we can have the holiday off


• even though holidays cause us to have to work lots of extra hours, the existence of the holiday makes it unlikely that we actually get paid overtime for those extra hours (since we have to actually WORK more than forty hours--not counting the holiday time off--in order to get paid overtime)


• holidays also add whole new layers of complexity to actually processing payroll accurately: we have to do extra audits to look for and fix problems; and also people often want to take time off to coincide with a holiday week, which causes a huge spike in data entry (for some specific reasons I could explain, but I don't want to bore you completely to death)

My plan for this coming week is this:

Sunday: Work however long I'm needed, which will hopefully be from 7am until maybe 1pm
Monday: This will be my crazy long day this week, 6:45am until who knows (7pm if I'm lucky)
Tuesday: 6:45 to 3:15 (hey, I should be able to join the Downtown Knitters next week!)
Wednesday: 6:45 until...I'll try to escape early, since I won't get overtime for those extra hours I put in earlier in the week anyway; then I'll probably run over to Twisted to check out their Anniversary Sale
Thursday: I'm OFF! Yay!!

AND THEN...

The following week I'm on vacation. I cannot wait. Nik and I haven't had an actual vacation since last October, when we went on our honeymoon. Depoe Bay, here we come!

Yeah, I'm getting a little excited and it's still over a week away! :)

On the knitting front: the SECRET project is nearly complete! Just some finishing touches left (which have to wait until it's dry). The flower hexagons for the scarf are blocked and waiting to be sewn together, if I could only figure out the best way to do it.

Anyone have any suggestions? I've tried a few things, but been a bit unhappy with each for various reasons. The problem, I think, is that they were blocked pretty aggressively to get that open flower look which caused the stitches along the outer edge to stretch. So when I sew through them, the stitches tend to pull the whole side tighter and at the same time the whole thing is kind of loose...

I tried to just slip stitch them together, thinking that would give them a little firmness but it looked kind of odd--and pulled in too much. It just occurred to me to maybe try the slip stitch again, but doing two slip stitches in each stitch. That might make it pull in less and also give them a better foundation. Hmm.

Guess that's the first thing I'll try in the morning. I think I'm just not accustomed to sewing crocheted pieces together, so I'm fumbling around a bit here. I'll figure out a way to handle it soon, I'm sure.

Awww, they're even cute all bunched up and floating in water. Look:



I was going to take a picture of them all pinned out, but was interrupted by dinner. And then it got dark. I'll try to remember to get a shot before I unpin them.

I think they'll be dry by morning, which means I can start sewing them together tomorrow! And then do the edging! I think this project will be done very soon. :D

This is what led me to believe I might be able to get 25--or close to 25--flowers from my skein of Claudia Handpainted Fingering yarn. Today I finished the 15th flower, though, and there's only a teeny tiny bit of yarn left. Hmph. Oh well, 15 will make a nice scarf length, leaving my second skein for the edging that goes all around the flowers.

Here they all are, unblocked and in a pile:



I'm going to try to get them blocked tomorrow so I can start sewing them together. Don't want to lose steam while I'm still excited about the project!

And now I should really go do a couple of seams on the baby sweater...

We're gearing up to have the windows and siding replaced on our house--all at once! There's a contractor coming on Saturday to get an idea of what we want and start to work up a quote. In anticipation of this, we've been cleaning/reorganizing/just plain moving things around. Tonight we shifted a bunch of stuff in the dining room/living room area. It looks much nicer in here already, but to a certain extent it's a losing battle. When you're only living in half a house, it's insanely hard to keep clutter at bay. Especially when so many of our things (notably: yarn and all the rest of my knitting/sewing/crafting supplies, plus books and other assorted items) have no home.

I should probably go around and take lots of detail shots of the house before the work gets started, but for now here's one from last summer just after the roof was finished:



I'm excited--the house is going to look so different after this project is done!

PS I now have ten little hexagon flowers. I weighed one and it looks like there might be enough yarn for 25 of them in this one skein! I'd anticipated making maybe 15 (they're approximately 4" across blocked, so that'd make the scarf--without the edging--about 5' long), but maybe I'll make it 20 or so...we'll see.

The Summer of Socks 2008 KAL started on Saturday, so I decided to set aside the Atomic Toes socks (which frankly haven't been getting much attention anyway) in favor of something that will actually count for the KAL. So Saturday morning I cast on for Ziggy. I've also been trying to get the "Secret Project" finished (getting close!), so I haven't spent a whole lot of time on Ziggy yet. Here's my progress so far:



I absolutely love how this sock is turning out so far, despite my inexperience with Fair Isle. If you look closely there are definitely flaws, but overall it's looking pretty good. If I do say so myself.

Also, I LOVE how the colors are striping so far.

The other thing that's been grabbing my attention here and there is actually a crochet project. I was talking to Shannon at Twisted last week and somehow the topic of crochet came up. I haven't been doing much crochet in recent years, mostly because--in many cases--I prefer the results achieved with knitting. However, crochet is a lot of fun. It goes really fast, and you can make unusual things pretty easily.

Lately, I'd been sporadically looking for a somewhat specific project: a crocheted scarf, with a lacy, maybe flowery, look. Something that could be used in warmer weather than the rest of my scarves. I'd poked around Ravelry and had found some things that were kind of the right idea, but not quite IT somehow. I told Shannon about the idea, and she pointed me to the two issues of Interweave Crochet that were on the magazine rack.

There are a lot of cute things in those two issues! I was tempted to buy both, but settled on just getting the Spring issue. Because the Spring issue had THE PATTERN in it.

I think Shannon and another woman who was knitting at the front of the shop might have thought I was a little crazy, because I took one look at the Floral Lace Belt (Ravelry link) and said, "There's my scarf!"

So that night I went home and did a test of one of the hexagon motifs and got this:



Pretty, no? This is leftover Yarntini from my Twisted Sky Socks--I just wanted to see what it would look like in fingering weight and a larger hook (I used an H for this one). Only problem is that the hexagon was way too big--the scarf would be super wide at this size.

Then I tried lace weight yarn and a G hook:



I liked this one, too, and I think it would block out nicely (I just pinned it for the picture), but it was really fiddly in a way that I knew would make me not want to work on the project.

Next try:



Aha! This one, I love. I love the colors, I like the size (the scarf might still be a bit wide, but not so bad). This is Claudia Haindpainted sock yarn in the "Oops" colorway, with a G hook. It's also fingering weight, but it's lighter than the Yarntini. Between the lighter weight yarn and the smaller hook (a G is a full millimeter smaller than an H), the motif came out to a pleasing size.

I have four hexagons so far (did three very rapidly earlier this evening--crochet is really fun sometimes!), and I'm thinking I'll need 12 or 15. I'll figure it out when I get there. :)