2008

Yay, my spoilee for HSKS5 got her package today!! I've also had a report from my spoiler that there's one in the mail for me now, too! Swaps are fun!

Since the veil of secrecy is now lifted, I can finally tell you about the so-called SECRET project! One of the requirements of this swap was to send a "handmade item" (a bag, a needleholder, or...something else, I don't remember). It was not required that this be a knitted item, but since I don't really have a place to put up my sewing machine and didn't have any other great ideas I decided to knit my spoilee a bag. I ran across the HP House Fair Isle Pouch Bag pattern and fell in love, so I ran with the idea.

As it happens this was my first completed Fair Isle project, and also my first lined bag. I was a bit worried during the knitting because no matter how careful I was with the floats, it contracted into a bumpy tube once it was a few rows away from the needles. I just kept hoping that blocking would fix it. So when it was done, I washed it and blocked it rather aggressively. Thankfully, blocking worked miracles and it came out GREAT!



(I didn't put any fringe on the bottom. I finished the bag late one night and frankly forgot. Then I decided I liked it just fine without.)

Here's one that shows the lining:



And, since knitters always seem to want to see the wrong side of Fair Isle, here's a shot of the inside before I lined it:



I followed the instructions for this bag pretty faithfully--with the exception of the fringe. I did make one major change, which was to use worsted weight yarn (Cascade 220--I'll have to look up the color numbers once I'm home again) rather than DK. I used a size 6 needle because I wanted the result to be pretty dense. Otherwise, I knit it as instructed and just let it turn out whatever size it wanted to be. I think it turned out around 11.5" x 14" post-blocking (Narcissa, can you verify that? I didn't write it down and only vaguely remember from measuring it for the lining). I used less than 1/4 yard of fabric for the lining. I sewed the lining completely by hand, which is something I haven't done for a long time (hand-sewing, I mean). I can't say that I love sewing by hand, but I am definitely proud of how the bag came out and I'm glad I went to the trouble.

I'll let you read about the rest of the swap kit over on Narcissa's blog, but I did want to mention one more thing. I had our wonderful local indie-dyer, Sharon of Stitchjones custom-dye a skein of her fantastic merino sock yarn in Slytherin colors. Here is the beautiful yarn she made for me to send on to my spoilee:

I've been zooming right along on my Flower Scarf. It looks great!

Then, on the way to the coast this afternoon, I RAN OUT OF YARN. :( :( :(

sigh

Anyone have any leftover Claudia Handpainted fingering in the "Oops" colorway? I don't need much!

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. :)

Emma asked us to post a "first" in knitting, and initially I couldn't really think of anything. I'm pretty adventurous, so there isn't much I've never tried. Perhaps my imagination is failing me, though. :D

However, I did recently learn a new technique which I used on my Twisted Sky Socks: knitting socks on two circular needles. Here they are again:



I love this technique so much that I've also used it for my latest pair, the Sorta Charade Socks:



These aren't quite finished yet--I'll get a much better picture once they are.

The Sorta Charade Socks are another first for me. I started out making a pair of the popular Charade Socks (I think you have to be on Ravelry to get the pattern), but ended up adapting that pattern to the sky architecture (used in my Twisted Sky Socks) from Cat Bordhi's book, New Pathways for Sock Knitters. Basically, I ended up taking the stitch pattern from Charade and putting into the Master Sky sock architecture from the book. Not quite an original design, but fun and unique!

We've been catching up on our shows tonight, since it's too hot tonight to do anything that requires movement.

We just watched last night's episodes of Grey's Anatomy and Lost. Lost is making it so worth having stuck it out this far! I can't wait for more! Too bad all that's left is the season finale--who knows how long we'll have to wait for the next season.

We also watched Don't Forget the Lyrics, which has been entertaining lately. Nik is convinced that I should go on the show. Haha. I do know the words to lots of songs and I tend to do pretty well playing along from my couch, but I'm actually not quite enough of a Leo--I'm not really comfortable being the center of attention, except in small doses. If I ever did go on the show, though, I definitely would not go for the million dollar song. I've seen it attempted twice now, and both songs were impossible. (Seriously. Who knows every word to Milli Vanilli's Blame it on the Rain?)

I went to Twisted after work today and petted lots of Blue Moon Fiber Arts yarn. In addition to all three weights of Socks that Rock, they're also carrying Laci (100% merino laceweight--gorgeous 1750 yard skeins), Silk Thread (100% silk, very fine & beautiful), Luscious Single Silk (50% merino, 50% silk, DK weight, in huge 500 yard skeins!), and Woobu (60% merino, 40% bambu, DK weight, also in huge skeins of 620 yards). It was fascinating seeing how the same colorway can look completely different on a different base yarn. The most striking difference was the Woobu. I picked up a skein of it in what looked like a charcoal gray color and was surprised to see that it was Thraven, the same colorway I'd been drooling over in the Laci (and in the Luscious, for that matter). In the Woobu, Thraven looked like charcoal gray with very subtle greens. Lovely, but not obviously the same as the black with blues and greens I'd been looking at in the Laci.

I LOVE that color--it's so pretty in every yarn I looked at. I may have to get some someday...

Around 4:00 this afternoon, I was sitting at a table on the sidewalk outside of Grand Central Bowl, waiting for Nik to pick me up. (We went on a work outing, bowling and food at Grand Central. That place is NICE!)

The weather was beautiful and I had 15-20 minutes to kill, so of course I was knitting. In fact, I was knitting this:



That's square #7 in progress, for my Lizard Ridge project. I've described this one as "clown colors." Heh.

So I was sitting there knitting, enjoying being outside, and a woman walked by (very quickly). On the way by, she said, "Pretty hat!"

Me: "... ... Thanks!"

Hat? I decided that it wasn't worth trying to correct her since 1) she was obviously in a hurry, and 2) I suppose the point was that she thought it was pretty, and it probably doesn't really matter whether or not she knows it isn't, in fact, a hat.

I was amused.

One complete Sorta Charade sock:



One nearly-complete Lizard Square:



A little bit of a baby sweater:



(I didn't actually work on this today, but I hadn't shown any pictures of it yet, so...)

We're home, just finished watching both Lost and Grey's Anatomy from last week, and now it's time for bed. Today kind of flew by, but it was a nice Mother's Day.

Nik made breakfast for both me and Mom, and we enjoyed our ocean view for the morning and early afternoon until we decided it was time to head home. The drive was mostly pretty nice, but there was apparently a big accident outside Dundee which caused us to have to detour. What a backup. We crawled along for miles, but eventually made it to Newberg where we stopped for a quick bite to eat at Burgerville before parting with Mom (she was headed to Wilsonville, while we were headed home to SE PDX). Burgerville was giving out free strawberry shortcake for moms today--it was yummy! (Um. I'm not a mom, but Mom shared hers. :D)

My Sorta Charade sock is done but for the toe, so I expect to finish it tomorrow. Will try to get pictures to post tomorrow. Goodnight!

As I mentioned in my last post, we're at Gleneden Beach for the weekend. It's apparently been sunny (if a bit cold) most of the week, but today? Alternately drizzly, foggy, misty, etc., all day. Gray, gray and more gray.

Oh well. I'd still rather be here looking at the ocean than home looking at the street in the rain. :D

All we did today was go into Newport for breakfast (at more like lunchtime). So I've been knitting most of the afternoon/evening, with a bit of reading thrown in. And visiting with Mom and Nik, of course. All in all, a very nice, relaxing day. Despite the weather.

I've made excellent progress on my Sorta Charade socks. The first one has a heel and I'm now working my way down the foot. I'll post photos tomorrow, probably. I also started the February Baby Sweater last night and am now through about three repeats of the lace pattern. Despite looking over the pattern before I started, I didn't notice that there was no mention of buttonholes until you get to the lace section. So...the garter stitch portion at the top has none. Oops. I've come up with an alternate plan for the buttons already, and I think it'll be fine.

I think it's supposed to rain more tomorrow, so there probably won't be any pretty Gleneden photos from me. Maybe I'll steal some more from Mom...

I think this post will be quick and picture-heavy...then I'm going to bed early, in an attempt to make up for the last couple of nights a bit.

Yesterday was fun. When I arrived at Twisted, I had a plan. One of my co-workers is pregnant and expecting a little girl in September, so I've decided it's time for me to finally do some baby knitting. In my blog-reading the other day I saw a sweater that Larissa just finished and thought, "oh, that might be the one!" And I wanted something pink, but not...TOO pink. So I went to the sock yarn wall (I was thinking fingering or sport weight) and landed at the Socks that Rock. I found this:



That's the color Pink Granite, which I really like with the subtle pinks and grays. I think it'll make a great baby sweater.

I brought it over to Emily and and asked her for a baby sweater pattern suggestion. She walked to the other side of the store and came back with a sweater on a hanger. It was the same one I'd just seen on Larissa's blog! (It's Elizabeth Zimmermann's February Sweater from the Knitter's Almanac, by the way.) So that pretty much sealed it for me. Emily convinced me to switch to the heavyweight STR (so nice that you can get Blue Moon's colorways in all sorts of different yarns and weights, isn't it?) to go with the pattern.

I also got these buttons for the sweater:



Now I just need the book!

Somehow, this also came home with me from Twisted:



That's more STR--mediumweight--in Atomic #6. Fell in love with the color at first sight.

When Nik and I got home from our evening out, there were two packages waiting for me. One contained 4 new skeins of Kureyon for my Lizard Ridge and this pretty sock yarn (I had to get it to get the order over the $25 minimum!):



The second package was from Blue Moon Fiber Arts, containing...I'm sure you can guess: More STR! These are all lightweight:



The Knitters Without Borders colorway. This is the one that got me to finally place an order with them. I'd missed the chance to get some when the Yarn Harlot was in town, so I decided to order it. So of course I ended up buying a couple more at the same time...



The Lucy colorway. (I'm a sucker for blue and brown together.)



Space Dust. There were so many beautiful colors to choose from that it was really hard to decide. This one really appealed to me, though.

So in one day, I went from no STR to five skeins in five colorways, in three different weights. Heh.

And, since I'm losing steam and really want to get to bed, just a couple more pictures.

My Charade-but-not-really-Charade sock, as of this evening:



(I'll explain the "not-really-Charade" part in another post soon.)

And Mom's shawl (Follow the Leader), about 34 rows in:



Oh, and I almost forgot. Hi Tammy! (I laughed when I saw your note on my BMFA invoice. :D)

So we took a few pictures yesterday. We were down in Tualatin, meeting Mom for lunch, but we were about half an hour early so we made a little side trip over to the little man-made lake in the center of Tualatin. For the first year and a half that I lived in the Portland area, I lived on this little lake. I miss the view and the geese, although I do like our house and living in SE Portland.

Nik and I ate dinner here on our first date:



That's Hayden's Grill, and those are people dining lakeside while enjoying the sun, as Nik and I did on our first date. It's on the south end of the lake; I lived in an apartment on the north end. (The path around the lake is only about 1/3 of a mile--all the way around--which is why I have a habit of referring to it as "the little lake.")

The purpose of our side trip, though, wasn't so much a trip down memory lane (although that's always nice!), but rather for these:



The Twisted Sky Socks, brilliant in the sunshine! (I love the brightness of those colors--and people's reactions to them.)

And, finally, Flair:



(Is my hair getting too long?)



And a bonus, since I grabbed it on the way out the door, too. My Dream in Color shrug, which I knitted, oh, last summer, I think, but never managed to take pictures of:





This shrug is from the Dream in Color Shrug pattern, and is knit in Dream in Color Classy (the color is Spring Tickle). I absolutely love this pattern, and this yarn. I still want to make another one.

Tomorrow is my loooong day at work. I'm hesitant to get my hopes up, but if today was any indication tomorrow should be one of the better processing Tuesdays. Which means I might be done by 6:30 instead of 8:30--at least so long as the day doesn't begin with a note like this. (That's from two weeks ago--scary start to the day.)

Unless I collapse from exhaustion by the time I get home tomorrow, I expect to be back with pictures of the in-progress Charade sock (pretty, pretty yarn!) and Follow the Leader shawl. Amazingly, I'm making decent progress on both. :)