What I did and What I SHOULD have been doing!

The March Madness Weather seems to be continuing well into April in Ohio this year.  One day last week we were near (or at) 80 degrees, the next couple of days brought us a thirty degree temperature drop, heavy rains, blustery winds and according to one of my customers, snow! (Luckily it didn't stick!) Also luckily, even though I had planned on taking my patio plants back outside last weekend, I never quite got around to it, so they didn't suffer through the frosty nights and mornings!

In my last post I talked about how I hadn't listened to that voice in the back of my head and that I am going to run out of yarn long before I run out of knitting on a shawl.  The wonderful people at Colourmart did look, but they do not have more.  They (well Sue actually) have offered to color match my yarn if I send them some, but that seems like an awful lot of work for them to do because of my lack of planning, so I will be frogging back on that one.  Part of me, the part that doesn't want to put in an "after thought" lifeline and catch flying beads when I pull that thread, says just to forget it, pick a different yarn and start over.  Part of me says that either way those beads are going to fly around the house* and to just grin and bear it.

So far, I haven't listened to either of those parts of me and did what any reasonable knitter would do when faced with this dilemma.....

If you click the FO2013 tag on the side bar you will notice something.....there has been an awful lot of things started, but not much finished around Chez Yarn Diet recently.  I should have worked on my Some Kind of Wrap,
 
 or even worked a few more rounds on that Plushie Tardis that seems to have stalled about two thirds of the way up from the base.
 
 I could have worked on some socks, or even the repairs that needed to be done on some socks.



 
But, I didn't.

I could have put knitting on hold and done some more weeding in the garden,

or dug over where our vegetables are going to grow.  I could have got the paint out and finished painting the trim in the laundry room.

I could have organized the bookshelves in the basement as none of us has done a good job of putting things back where they belong and over the winter an awful lot of new books came into the house that need to be put away properly, not just stacked on top of shelves haphazardly.

I should have cut the grass when it wasn't raining, but at least for that one I have an excuse....when you have a battery operated electric lawn mower it is all very well plugging the charger into the mower, you still have to plug the other end into an outlet on the wall or you will still have a "low battery" mower, which doesn't go very far for that first mow of the season.

Did I do any of those things?

Nope.

What is it that I think a reasonable knitter does when faced with a yarn dilemma, and the multitude of unfinished projects I have scattered around my house?

I think she casts on some more!

We have another baby blanket, it was supposed to be two tone but the ultra sound** wasn't able  tell for sure if the second color should be blue or pink so I am keeping it simple and knitting all the way through with white.
 
And...
 

 
The Anniversary Mystery Shawl 2013 in some of Lara's Creations amazing ColourWave yarn.  I am in no danger of running out of yarn on this one, pattern calls for a little under 900 yards and I have 1260 to play with!

While I am thinking about it I have been meaning to tell everyone about these nifty keen, super cool, totally rad blocking wires I am dying to try out!  (Maybe if I ever finish anything I can!) Inspinknitty, who I have no affiliation with, has these flexible wires that will hold curves! Seriously no kinks, no fuss, no muss...ok now I am starting to sound like an infomercial!  But, seriously, go check them out!

What's on your needles?  Finish anything fun to knit lately? With the attention span I seem to have right now I should be looking for a new project in about five minutes.

~M

*I actually have a plan for the flying bead issue, put the whole thing in a ziplock bag and just have the end of the thread I am pulling on sticking out, that way the beads will all stay in the bag when I am done ripping!
**No, I am not pregnant, but there is a bout of pregnancy going on around me, this blanket will not be joining the collection I have started in my Baby Blankets through Time project, but it is a handy tag to use to keep all the blanket ideas together.  In case you are wondering, that pattern is a modification of Anna Dalvi's Pierina Shawl.

Plan ahea.......

Why is it all my weeks seem to be spent running as fast as I can without actually getting anywhere?

I suppose I might even feel a little better about it if I was even going in circles, but so far I seem to be retracing my steps over and over again.

For instance......

I went grocery shopping today, which seems a little silly as I was just at that very store on Thursday evening, but I suppose that having three teenagers in the house does make for running out of things, not to mention space in the fridge to hold it all!  I had my usual cart full of stuff, lots of fruits and veggies, milk, more milk, even more milk, the stuff I can't seem to keep in the house no matter how much I bring home.  I walked all over that store, I don't think I missed a single aisle, before I got my total, bagged my assorted foods and headed back to the car.  When I get to the car I have all kinds of keys, frequent shopper tokens for various places, but no car key.

Wondering if I was being more moronic than usual, I peeked in the windows to see if maybe the silly thing was sitting on the seat where it had fallen off the carbine hook I keep all my keys on. (Side note, I don't carry a purse that could hold keys, just a wallet that is my cell phone holder and the hook with all my keys on it that gets attached to my belt.  I have the whole Bat Girl thing going on, with everything I need attached to the belt it is really hard to leave things behind.)

A little concerned I then pushed my cart full of bagged groceries back into the grocery store to see if maybe the key was at the checkout area.

No luck.

One of the nice things about always shopping at the same store, all the cashiers and bag people know me and before long we had a whole posse of key seekers wandering every aisle of the store, looking under display shelving in case the key had dropped off and been kicked under something.  You would be amazed at some of what we saw under those shelves...I mean seriously,  single slices of bread?  How does that happen?

Just when we were about to all meet up in the middle the cashier comes up to me, slightly pink and with a very chagrined look on her face. "Is this your key?" she asked, holding up the key that all of us had been crawling around on the floors looking for..."It was in my smock pocket".

Yep, retraced all those steps for nothing! And she didn't buy my story that it meant she wanted to drive me home and put my groceries away!

My knitting might also turn into an exercise in retracing my steps!  I have been working, off and on, more off than on, on my ColourMart Spring Contest entry and the rules say that Lace Shawls have to both be lace and substantial to qualify.  The pattern I picked, Ethereal, as originally written is an okay size shawl, but not really something that I would call substantial and I am knitting with a 2/28nm lace weight yarn so I knew to get a good size on it I would need to add some repeats.  Which I did, I added a whole bunch of repeats to the body of the shawl and just recently started the final chart, which are 40 rows of fairly heavy patterning to which I have added beads.
 
Looks something like that so far.

That is 12 rows into the 40 row border chart and that little voice in the back of my head that sometimes speaks up, who in all truth has been whispering in my ears for a while now about this, started yelling pretty loudly..."Um, you might want to check how much yarn you have left." followed by a fairly insistent "Weigh the cone you ding dong, I think you are going to run out of yarn before you run out of shawl knitting here."

I finally gave in, and the little voice is right, there is no way the amount of yarn left on the cone is going to match the amount of knitting left to do in the shawl, even if the cone weighed nothing (and they don't, somewhere between 32 and 38 grams of the 72 grams I have is cone!) I will be short.

Just in case, and knowing as I do that neutral colors like cream go really fast on the ColourMart site, I checked to see if there was still any on the website to buy.  No love there, so now I have placed what happens to this knitting in the hands of the person who seems to have a magic touch when it comes to finding things and sent an email to part of the ColourMart team asking if perhaps, in some dark corner, or at the bottom of one of the multitude of rolling bins that they store cones of yarn in, there happens to be another cone.  Part of me has absolute faith that a single cone of the yarn will be found and says to keep knitting while I wait for the search to go on, part of me says to rip back to before the second chart, take out a repeat and start over from there.  I do know that if there is any there, that magical finder will find it, it is uncanny how many times I have heard stories of people in just my situation who were rescued at the last second with an "I found some" email.

In the meantime, looks like spring has finally arrived in Ohio!

Maybe instead of sitting here fretting about yarn I should go pull up some more weeds!

~M

Two A and now Two B

Yet again, I have very little to show on the knitting front.  I spent a lot of the week playing catch-up at work, Spring Break might have been nice from a not having to get up and put a suit on first thing every morning, but it also meant I had 187 emails to deal with when I got back to my office!

We had a wonderful first quarter at the branch, which also leads to lots of planning on how to top it, because as we all know, the reward for a job well done is a harder job.  Probably why I am taking my time in what is really a very easy knit for the ColourMart Spring Contest.  No fancy new stitches to learn, fairly easy to read charts, but when you add 8 repeats of the first one it does take on more of a  difficulty in scope.

Chart 1 of this pattern gives you the option to knit more or less based on your yarn and how big you want the shawl to be.  I like to be able to wrap a shawl all the way around me, so bigger was certainly in the cards, the only question is, have I gone big enough?  Because the one thing I had forgotten is how quickly I get bored with the same pattern repeat over and over again!

Chart 2 A flew by and I am now set to start Chart 2 B, where I am adding beads with gay abandon!

Maybe next week I will have some to show you, for today I am setting up where to put them.  :)

~M