Doldrums

The doldrums is a colloquial expression derived from historical maritime usage, in which it refers to those parts of the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean affected by the Intertropical Convergence Zone, a low-pressure area around the equator where the prevailing winds are calm.

In other words, take your own risk sailing there, you could be stuck for days without making any forward motion.

Doldrums are also that place in your knitting where you knit and knit and knit, knowing by the decreasing amount of yarn in the ball you are using that you have to be making great forward progress, and yet, somehow, when you look at your knitting you have barely made a dent.  Some people also call this edging!

I am in the Doldrums of my Fractal Blanket!

I have used up all the partial balls that were left over from making squares...when there wasn't enough yarn to knit another complete square without joining I put it aside and started a new ball.  And, I have used a huge chunk out of another ball of yarn and the end is not in sight.  Which isn't really made any better by Andrea hinting that she will soon be posting the next project....in the doldrums of edging I would leap at the chance to cast on the next thing instead of working yet another pattern repeat.  Although, the pattern repeats are very pretty and the wider edging I picked from our choices does look ever so nice with the rest of the blanket, at least as far as I can tell with it still on the needles!

As with all lace, really, to know for sure how great it looks I need to finish it up and block it!

Wanna see how it looks so far?

Other than working on that edging my only other knitting has been repair work!  Seems like children at my house are getting to be a bit hard on their hand knit socks, two replaced toes (from different pairs) a heel and I still have some repair work to do.  At least the toes were easy, I just ripped out the old ones and knit new ones in their place rather than trying to darn them. And quicker than my usual holding them over the garbage can, saying "Darn you sock" and knitting a whole new pair!

I suppose it is back to the doldrums for me....anything exciting on your needles?

~M

Gray and Brown

Over the past few weeks the Yarn Harlot has blogged about how knitting in nice, bright, cheery colors helps to offset the grey and white world that we seem to be living in right now. Grey skies, white snow, grey slush on the roads, mounds of white stuff with salt, garbage, dirt showing through to make things really ugly in the mundane world.

Pity I didn't listen to her, all my knitting this week is shades of grey and brown!

This week the group files for the Infinity Knitalong included all the final instructions for the Fractal Blanket.  After sewing my 12 squares together I picked up the loops all the way around and started in on Border One.  As I didn't knit as many squares, and as I knew that Andrea actually used very little of her contrast color, I knew going into it that I would be making my border deeper than hers, my plan is to knit as long as the yarn holds out and then kick myself because there will be miles of edging to go beyond that....

But in the meantime I read through the rest of the instructions and realized that next I will have to do some fudging.  The edging is a multiple of 10 rows, so any multiple of ten stitches per side of the blanket will work, my problem is I went with both an odd and an even number of squares (3 which is odd, by 4 which is even) and that means I will never have a multiple of 10 on both the long and the short sides at the same time!

Friday was Valentine's Day, and I made out like a bandit!  Which is even nicer as I didn't expect to get so much as a card from anyone! I didn't even get it all photo'd for the blog, there was another box of truffles that seems to have disappeared somewhere between Friday and today!

 


TOB wanted to show you all his yarn stash too.  At least it will be easy to tell apart from mine!

I have many more rows of Border One to knit, so I am off...with this view out my window knitting is the only sensible thing to do during my bank holiday!

~M

Forget the Starks, I want a family motto about Spring!

HBO has a fairly popular television series, The Game of Thrones, which is (mostly) based on a series of books by George RR Martin.  In both the books and the show you are following members of several families that each have their own crest and motto.  One of the families, The Starks, motto is Winter is Coming.

Forget coming, winter is here and it is certainly making its presence known in Central Ohio! 

We had freezing rain, snow, lots of snow, more below 0 degrees F air temps with wind chills added to them.  We had delayed days at school, cancelled days at school and no snow plows that seemed to be willing to do anything about the roads near where I work.  (The story that went residential side streets have not been cleared but main roads are done was a load of horse feathers, the street where I work is all businesses and had seen nothing in the way of a snow plow or salt truck for days!)

It has to end and soon, if for no other reason that I now have nowhere else to put the snow I take off the driveway as I can't throw it high enough to get it over the mounds that have formed at the edges of my yard from Wednesday's snow and todays additions.

I am ready for spring.

More than ready!

Especially as all this dealing with snow and longer commutes is cutting into my knitting time and all I have to show you for a week is two more squares of my Fractal Blanket.

What did you knit this week?

~M

One through Ten

This past week it was warmer in Alaska than it was in Central Ohio! 

Yet again I find myself wondering what possessed me to think that moving to somewhere with actual seasons, rather than just warm rain (April through October) and cold rain (November through March).  This year even the kids, who in the past have said no to looking to move somewhere more temperate, are coming around to my way of thinking....but it is hard to drag them around when in high school, so maybe I should just tough it out for a few more winters! Not to mention the fact that I have a job here, and selling the house would be easier said than done.

None of my dreaming of someplace less cold was helped by people keep telling me, today, that a certain groundhog says we are in for six more weeks of winter!

I think that what I need is to win the lottery (which won't happen, I don't play!) and a nice warm blanket. (Which will happen, but I am not knitting fast enough!)

Presenting squares One through Ten of the Fractal Blanket from the Infinity KAL Group.

I am using Knit Picks Chroma in  Fossil.  The Chroma itself  is a single ply wool yarn with some variations in the spinning that give it a hand spun look. 
 
I am making no attempt to have the squares match at all, although some almost matching is happening naturally.  I have been blocking the squares as I go so that when I am good and tired of knitting them I will be ready for the next step.

I really think that this pattern would make a great baby blanket, it is sheer will power (or maybe lack of hours in the day) that has stopped me from digging through my baby yarn collection and casting on for one.

But as it is still chilly here, I will leave you to your knitting now...I have a few more squares to knit before I have a blanket!

~M

Wagon, what wagon?

Right after Christmas I went on my latest yarn diet.  Having cleaned out the stash room to dig out some not stash things that were hidden in there right before the holidays I realized that it was a little tiny bit out of control.

Yes, just a little tiny bit.

Nothing that some extra baskets and containers couldn't handle.

Or giving away a ton of books to create space on bookshelves for yarn.

Or maybe a rather large knitting jag!

I was doing really well until TOB knit this for his sister for her birthday.

He had knit two for teacher gifts during the holidays (one escaped without being photo'd ) so he found that knitting a third one for TDQ was a quick, yet thoughtful, gift.  We like those around these parts!

All was well until he asked for another ball of yarn.  Now that exceptionally large stash that I have in the stash room runs from acrylic to cashmere in a rainbow of colors, but the one thing it doesn't usually contain a lot of is funky yarn!

There isn't any more in my stash and he isn't ready to take the plunge to regular knitting yarn that takes more than a few hours to knit a scarf with.

So what is a mother to do?

Yeah, some more stash enhancement will be heading my way shortly.  I ordered online as the roads are awful today, weren't all that great yesterday and I work some really long hours this coming week.

Having shown you TOB's finished object for the week, would you like to see some of mine?

My second Lichen is finished.  No beads this time, it was my traveling knitting and when I hit the row where the beads were supposed to go I didn't have them with me, so I just kept on knitting.  This is knit in ShaSha from Land O Lace.

The third pattern shared with the group is Kelpie.

I named my project, Blood Thirsty Kelpie, knit out of Knitted to a T's sock yarn in the colorway HeartThrob it is a more dramatic piece than I would usually wear and not in TDQ's favorite color (her favorite saying right now is "Everything purple is mine, everything else can be painted or dyed.) so it might make its way into my gifting box.

Today we got the start of the next project files.  This time for a Fractal Blanket, that can also be knit as a stole.  Like the Summer Squares pieces this is a modular knit, so I can make it as big or as small as I like and by using different numbers of squares and different yarns, yet again, Andrea has created a project that I can go back to a hundred times and still never really knit the same thing twice.
 
Guess I have a few more of these to knit though!

~M

I wish I had infinite time for my infinity knitting!

Don't you wish you had infinite time, to do whatever it is that you want?  As long as you need to prepare for things, as much sleep as you can possibly get, as much knitting time as you could ever dream of!

Me too!

But, alas, we all have other things tugging on our time.  Pulling us in different directions, sometimes, than the ones we want to go in.  Stopping us from getting to spend all our time on things we desire to spend time on and instead making us do those things we have to do.

I had hoped to have a couple of finished objects for you today, but those things that I have to do kept pulling me away from the things I wanted to do, so I have an in progress shot and a completed shot for you.

The latest in the Infinity Projects from Andrea, of Bad Cat Designs is called Lichen. (side note, I don't now how she gets so creative with the names of her projects, but for many of her patterns she will tell you about the name and why that particular word, or phrase is important to her, which I, in my knitting geeky kinda way, think is really cool!)  Andrea explains that Lichen's are symbiotic, used in dyes, medications and perfumes, come in many different earthy colors and are long living but vulnerable to their environment.  Further research showed me that they can be used as emergency food supplies (but be careful, they contain toxins) and can survive, unprotected in space.  (Now that is truly impressive.)

My first Lichen is in a varigated sock yarn in blue tones. (Yes, they come in blues, purples too!)  with clear ab beads on the final pattern row.

My second is in ShaSha from Land O Lace in the discontinued colorway of Maplewood, this is the one I hoped to finish, but maybe tomorrow while I am waiting for TFB to get his braces adjusted I will finish off those final few rows!

TDQ wants you to know that the Red Thing is now hers, never to be in my hands again, and the Yellow piece is beautiful but I can keep that one.  Maybe instead of The Drama Queen we should call her the Spoiler Queen.

For those of you who are a part of the Infinity Knit Along, practice your center starts and post pictures of your Lichen's.  I already have coveted a few (could be why I have two!) but I am sure that more of you have some fabulous colorways I haven't drooled over yet.

~M

Well, What About...???

Today is Sunday, the day I usually find something to put on the blog just to let people know I am still alive and knitting.  Today I was in a bit of a dither about it though.  Not that there hasn't been any knitting going on, there has, but....

The conversation with TDQ went like this.

"I don't know what to blog about this week." yeah, that would be me.

"What about the yellow thing, it is starting to look like something." - and that would be TDQ.

Me, sadly shaking my head, "Nope, can't talk about that one."

"Oh," scrunching her lips all to one side and frowning. "Then what about the red one?"

Me, again, sadly shaking my head. "That one too."

"Oh, that's a problem isn't it, they are what you have been working on all week." Again she scrunches up her lips and frowns. "You could tell everyone about how the cat dumped my entire bead collection all over the floor and we have been trying to sort them out for ages now......." she pauses dramatically, "No, you better not talk about that, I don't want your blog readers to think I am dumb, leaving my beads on my bed like that."

So instead, we will talk about my lack of progress on the other things I should be knitting!

My Peridot Shawl, out of Lara's Creations Angel's Kiss (and I can't say enough good things about how that yarn feels in my hands!) is growing, but very slowly.  I wanted something that was more than a triangle, and showcased the halo of the yarn before hitting a fancy lace edge.  I started out just kind of winging what I wanted and then started looking for a lace border that would fit my stitch count.  After much deliberation I think I am going to steal the fancy lace edge from a shawl called Tiong Bahru.  The shaping of mine is a little bit different, so I will have to make a couple of adjustments to get to the right stitch count before adding the lace, but yarn is pretty forgiving where a stitch or three are concerned.  I think I spent more time figuring out what lace to add than actually knitting on it, so not much difference from the last time you saw her.

So that I will actually have something to talk about next week I did cast on for Lichen, the next project in the Infinity series from Bad Cat Designs. (Of course if you didn't join up yet, you still can, there are several more patterns to come....at least that is what a little bird told me, and they get better and better as we go!)

This time I am knitting with a yarn from another of my favorite independent dyers.  Bev at Land O Lace makes some beautiful Just About's in lace and fingering weight yarns.  This one is Sha Sha (they are all named for nieces and special people in her life) and I have barely cast on but can already tell that I am going to love the subtle shading in my moebious!

Have a great knitting week.  Hopefully by this time next week I will have something more than cast on's to show you!

~M