Re-Runs and Spoilers

Have you ever played that game where people ask you.."If your life was a television show, what would it be called?"  This past week I am not sure what the title of my life story would be, but I can tell you we are in re-run season!

Our Monday episode, again, saw our fearless knitter trying to cram three days of errands into a single bank holiday.  Sunday's blogging even got moved to Monday, which was one of the few things she actually completed.

Tuesday was spent trying to cram Monday's chores and work schedule into a day that also had it's own chores and work schedule.

Wednesday was, almost, a re-run of Tuesday, with the addition of a couple of conference calls, and still those errands from Monday were being pushed aside.

And so it went all week.

Even my knitting was re-runs.

A couple more squares and a repeat of a pair of socks!

I so very nearly made it to the end of the second sock without having to break into the very stripey looking skein of yarn.  For the want of the last three decrease rounds I had to do it, though!

I don't think it even shows, at least while they are still wet and on the blockers, and once they are on my feet no-one will ever know!

In the Spoiler department, after a poll on the Yahoo Group, Andrea (Bad Cat Designs) is giving everyone a choice.  Knit her  Winter Extravaganza as a mystery or know what you are getting into.  Only click here if you want to know what you are getting into!

So, this week was the week of Re-runs and Spoilers, I wonder what this coming week will hold?

~M

Got any spare needles?

I have  discovered a problem with the case of startitus that I have had lately......All of the projects have been long term things.  Big, like blankets and fuzzy wrap things, or tedious like Tardis Plushies, so although there has been knitting there isn't a lot to show because, really, who wants to see more pictures of squares no matter how attractive I think the colors are working out, or more repeats of one lace pattern, or a big blue blob?

I did sneak a pair of alpaca socks in, they were a birthday gift that was quite a bit late, but at least seemed to be appreciated!  The yarn has been aging in my stash for a bit, and is long since discontinued but I had 3 skeins left, these socks took most of two of them.  In a fit of tempting the knitting gods to laugh at me I took the leftovers from the socks and a hat that I also knit from this yarn a while back and cast on a smaller pair of socks for myself.  I suspect that the toe ,and maybe part of the foot, of one will look a little different as the last skein of this yarn I have is much more stripey, being hand dyed there is that chance of variation even when you buy them all at the same time.  But all I want is something soft and squoushy to keep my toes warm!

In the middle of the keep knitting the things I already have going I had a rude awakening at the drug store.  I had stopped in to pick up my latest levels of prescriptions and my credit card would not work.  The pharmacist called the number and got put on hold, and I was on my way to a meeting so just grabbed my debit card and used it to pay instead.  When I finally got in touch with the credit card area of the bank I found out that my card number was having a jolly time in England without me!  Having not used the card anywhere I wouldn't usually, I was at a loss as to how my card number was exposed, but cancelled it and went on with my day.  (Side note here, I am very good at making sure that we live within the budget, so good that it was actually amazing that I had my debit card with me, I use my credit card for everything, rack up the reward points and pay it off when the statement comes in.  Waiting ten days for a new one was going to be a huge life style change!  But I survived and the new card came in on Saturday, just in time for grocery shopping and kids needing new shoes!)

Since that day at the drug store I have found out that one of the online retailers that I use, Knit Picks, had their info exposed and I am not the only knitter who had fraud on their credit card...and Knit Picks wasn't even customer service oriented enough to tell their customers this themselves!

Which is a pity, because with all those needles in projects I had been about to place an order for more cables for my interchangeable needles and some more cotton yarn for the baby blanket, and now....well now I am not sure I can trust them to be honest with me and I don't want to complete the purchase!

So, if you have spare cables or needles maybe you could send them my way because there is something good coming.

A project I have been waiting to start.  It is tradition, after all, that I knit along with the Bad Cat when she has something special on the needles!

I am late inviting you to the party, but won't you join me at the Winter Extravaganza?  The knit alongs are always fun, lots of happy chit chat and fellowship from knitters around the world and the timing couldn't be better for all of us.  Still chilly enough to knit and wear a mohair wrap for those of us in North America, and it should be heading into fall and cool enough to knit and wear a mohair wrap for those of you in the Southern Hemisphere.

~M

The Fickleness Goes On and on and on....

Maybe it is the weather, cold and snowy, or maybe it is my inability to focus on one thing until I am finished with it, but I played around with lots of yarn this week, but have nothing to show for it!

What I especially don't have to show for it is any progress on the Tardis Plushie.  It is exactly as when you last saw it...well now the yarn is crammed inside it, but you get the point!

I did rip the cotton yarn off the outside of one of the blanket squares I had made and replaced it with wool,

then finished up one more square and started the fourth.

The second Water for the Elephants sock still isn't cast on, but I managed to cast on a "foot oven" (scroll to the bottom of the post) 
 
I don't like the yarns I am using, too much contrast, so I will stash dive again to come up with a more pleasing color combo...which still doesn't get WftE knit!

And, well I played around with that cotton yarn a little bit more and actually followed someone elses pattern for a square.
 
 I think that could end up being my next baby blanket knit - this one for a baby that isn't expected to arrive years and years from now, but much sooner.  I have a variation on that pattern in mind, we will see if I can actually make it work!

I think in all this "startitus" my fingers are trying to tell me that I am looking for a certain project...now if I could just have my mind catch up and figure out what it is I might pair that "startitus" with some "finishitupus"!

~M

Fickle

My plan failed, the one that went "if I call it Spring Cleaning, Spring will come" plan was derailed with more snow, and bitterly cold weather,  this past week.  Great weather for sitting next to a cozy fire and knitting, but I couldn't seem to get as much of that as I would have liked to in.  It might be the whole getting older thing, but I find that being cold really drains me, and once I am cold it takes me forever to warm up!

This was also the week of TDQ's birthday.  I thought I had that all under control as well, gifts purchased and made (well the blue thing isn't finished but she knew that heading into the day) but by the time I got home she was well into the grouchies and would not be budged!  (Note to all mothers of teenage girls out there, triple check that when your darling teenager says she wants pineapple upside down cake, that she doesn't really want ice cream cake.  Obviously in teen speak sometimes pineapple means ice cream and I didn't get it translated properly!)  I later found out that wasn't all that had "gone wrong" with her day, someone who should have remembered her birthday forgot to even say Happy Birthday, someone who should leave her alone felt a need to reopen old hurts by mailing something here.  All around I can see why she caught the grouchies and kept them close for the rest of the day!


The good news is, she got over most of them, and is wearing her socks and other presents I got her and back to her usual self today.

Would you like to see the little progress I made on her Blue Thing?  Amanda, you were right, it is shaping up to be a Tardis.

I need to get some more of the base blue to finish it up, and figure out if she wants it soft and cuddly or firm and suitable for a door stop!

In my abbreviated lunch times I got a few more repeats of my Some Kind of Wrap done,
 
 and finished up one Water for the Elephants sock...
 
and then made a tragic mistake. Rather than cast on for the next sock right away  I might have been distracted by the colors in some yarn TDQ found on one of our recent shopping trips.
 
 Would you believe those gorgeous colors, in what feels like real wool no less, were 80 cents for 50 gram balls????  I think we cleared them out of that colorway, all nine balls, but I will check back another time and really search the boxes they were in, just in case!

TDQ finds wool a bit scratchy to wear, but is more than happy to cuddle up in a blanket so I tried pairing it with some cream cotton to make a modular blanket for her.

Then changed my mind and dragged out some of the wool that a friend passed on to me when it had been sitting in a storage room for years.  It is hard to tell from the pictures, but the first square has the cotton and for the second I pulled out the cone of "natural 100% virgin wool" circa nineteen hundred and frozen to death!  I think that I will make this lap blanket sized, just because I would hate to be the poor fool handwashing a bed sized blanket every time she spills her tea on it!

If I had put all the knitting time on those projects together, I could probably have finished something!  What can I say, I am a fickle knitter!

~M

The Week that was.....

What did you get up to this week?

I got up to a little finishing, a little starting, a little feeling like one of the Step Sisters from Cinderella, a little starting over and a little continuing.

We will take it from the top!

In the finishing department we have Candy Cane Socks.

Destined to be worn on the feet of TDQ, but not until her birthday, they are a plain vanilla sock with a hint of sparkle.  I had the yarn in my stash for a while, and now I can't find the ball band to tell you what it was! Obviously it was meant for Christmas style socks with a color name like Candy Cane, when the ball band shows up (possibly in the bottom of my traveling knitting bag) I will let you know!

Do you think she will like them?

In the starting department we have Water for the Elephants.  As soon as I had one pair of socks off the needles I cast on another!  I haven't knit stranded socks in a while and I am the next one that needs some socks so I picked out some neutral tones and set myself up with a little music.  Singing along and knitting didn't work out too well for me, as I put the heel in on the wrong side, so the pretty little elephant was going to be forever looking at where we had been instead of where we were going.

 
 Not one to give up so easily I was prepared to live with that small error, right up until I decided to try the sock on!  Just like the step sisters in Cinderella, there was no forcing that sock onto my foot!  But, starting over has it's good points, I like my socks just a little taller than the pattern so I took the opportunity to add a small section to the leg, and while I was at it I rearranged the charts just a little so I can do my favorite heel and keep the start of the round in the back the way I like.

And in all of this I also fought with acrylic yarn that wants to get tangled up and knit a few more rows on the Big Blue Thing,
 
 and a few more repeats on my red mohair lace thing.

Not too bad, I always feel like I am behind these days, but I do have something to show for the little bit of knitting time I eek out of every day!

~M

Mid January Thaw

The last of the snow on my driveway finally melted away in the rain today.  I am not sad about that at all!  After the first day of being on the ground it gets so dirty and nasty looking that I have wanted it gone for a while now!  Of course in it's wake the snow has left giant mud puddles for dogs and kids to run through, so now I am making a career of moping floors, rather than shoveling snow!

As we had a couple of days of very warm temperatures and rain, rather than snow, I seem to have been bitten by the spring cleaning bug. Cabinets in the kitchen were turned out, the laundry room was emptied of all but the impossible to move things and scrubbed down and then the boys and I cleaned out their closet.  They are at that difficult age where it is really difficult to decide which of their treasured toys are still treasured and which they will look at and declare "How did I ever like that?" and "What ever made me think that was cool?".  We found some things they had forgotten they had, and created a huge pile of things to go to a charity.  I think that everyone is happier now that it is more organized, although we still have some tubs of things to go through over the next couple of weekends, it looks so much better now!

For Christmas all three got Rigid Heddle Looms, I keep trying to get everyone into something yarny!  The Other Brother finished his first project, a bookmark for me!  He wants to make fancier things, and the timing for a post from The Yarn Harlot couldn't have been better, because there is a lot you can do with a Rigid Heddle Loom!  I suspect that I am getting fancy dish towels from one child during this coming year.

My knitting life is still a little on the slow side, at least on what I can show you!  (Yes, there are always secret projects that don't make it to the blog, or at least not yet!)

My  MIL Christmas yarn is starting to turn into Some Kind of Wrap.

I am putting button holes all the way up on both sides, and if it works out the way I think it will, that should mean a million, well maybe six or seven, different ways of wearing this when it is done.

I am just a little further on the socks, I have the heel turned on the second and then it is the home stretch to the toes.

TDQ has been very insistent that she wants a specific "thing" for her birthday.  Yesterday we stopped into a big box craft store to get the right colors (even if I did grossly misjudge how much yarn her "thing" is going to take and will have to go back!)  I am always disappointed of late at the lack of what I would call real crafty things in these stores, and the yarn section is down to one, very small, aisle, filled with acrylic and one brand of sock yarn.

Can you tell what it is yet, other than driving me crazy I mean?  Hopefully by next week a chunk more of it will be done!

Have a great week, I have another busy one in store for me, but hope to get at least some knitting off the needles.

~M

A little bit of lace, and little bit of stripes

Well what do you know, I made it back before the end of the month!  I don't really do yearly resolutions, a year sounds like a terribly long time to me, so I work more on monthly habits...so far so good on this one, the blog more often one!

My house seems so much bigger without all the Christmas Trees and decorations in it.  All our gifts have found new homes to live in, although I do have to keep telling TOB that the dirty laundry basket is not a place to keep new clothes!

I have been very busy at work, new goals were handed out for the year and I really had to work on my own attitude before rolling them out to my team.  The biggest problem is easy year we do better than the year before and I was pretty darn impressed with some of the numbers we have been able to hit in the past, but goals never get smaller and the stretch to hit them is always a little harder, and my team always rises to the occasion but when you look at the annual goal in the middle of a branch that has no customers in it and the snow falling all around you it seems a bit overwhelming.

But even with the extra calculating I was doing at home I did get a little knitting accomplished!

I finished a baby blanket for an English Teacher.  I again turned to the Summer Squares project from Bad Cat Designs for my inspiration.  This one has violin as the center square with the border and edging from The Blue Quartet to round out (well square out really) the blanket.  It took me far too long to knit it, mostly because it rode around in my car not being worked on for several weeks.

Cheap acrylic yarn as I have no idea if the teacher is up for hand washing a baby blanket or not and very soon, probably as soon as I finish typing here, it will be steam killed to hold its shape and blocking.  (I have already straightened those wonky edges!)

In other knitting I have been playing around with the yarn that my MIL sent.  Berroco Cirrus  and think that I might turn it into some kind of wrap, a convertible one with buttons that can be moved to turn it into a scarf, shrug, oversized cowl.

We'll see how that turns out, right now I am still playing with lace patterns but this will end up as a finished item, she sent enough yarn to make three!

And of course it wouldn't be the start of the new year without the start of some new socks.

I am letting the yarn do the work on these and they will be my in the dark, or tv watching, knitting until I finish the second one!  These will be for TDQ as she has a birthday coming up and doesn't care that a colorway named Candy Cane sounds like more of a Christmas sock than a birthday sock to me.

So what is on your needles?  I don't think that the socks will hold me for long and I might be in the market for a new project!

~M