Knitting Disaster Q & A

QUESTION: How do you know when the purple lace scarf is long enough?

ANSWER: It depends. Who is it for? How tall is she? How long would she like it to be? How will she wear it?

ANSWER FOR MORONS: It's long enough when, in an effort to lay it out to its full length so you can measure it, you manage to yank half of it off the needles. It's lace. It'll never be the same.

Time to cast off, I mean, time to go make lemons out of lemonade, or whatever.

Poppy's Sweater

Heh, heh, heh. In all its glory, Dirtbunny.net presents....

Poppy's Sweater

'Tis a thing o' beauty, if I do say so myself. I love it because it is soft and cuddly. I love it because it is well-constructed. I love it because it is made entirely of leftover yarn and cost me a mere $4 and that was for the buttons. I love the buttons.

Also, check out this seam:

YOU CAN'T EVEN SEE IT! Ha! Because it is perfectly done. I sat down with my books and charts and diagrams and my three pairs of glasses and I taught myself how to do it correctly and voila!

Fear not the sweater. The impatient Bunny Slob has learned to seam neatly. It can be done.

More thunder

It is time for El Puto to go for his evening walk. He does not want to go because another thunderstorm is passing near here--not enough for rain Chez Nous, but enough so he can hear the thunder. He has been dragged out with promises that he can come home as soon as he makes dookie. The last thing I heard The Man say to him was "Get ready! Think poopy thoughts!" Trust me on this: those words, or any like them, were not spoken in this house before the dogs came.



And that leave me free to catch up with what's on the needles. First, what's off the needles:





The dear, departed blue ribbed socks. They started out fun, but the love ran cold, man; the spark is gone. So they are done, and that's good.

Also, Poppy's sweater is off the needles, stitched together, blocked, and is drying flat. When I get buttons and sew them on, it will be finished, and then you can see.

The purple scarf is still chugging along, and the tiger socks are destined to become my new commuter sock knitting, so they won't take much longer. Here's the March sock club sock, aka "Leafling":

This is knitting that requires frequent consulting of the pattern, so it's home knitting for now.

And the back part of The Bean's lilac dress is done. Here it is modeled by handsome international porn star El Puto:

I have fourteen inches of "teal" sleeve, as worn here by Der Kirbenhund:

Plain stockinette stitch and not much worth seeing. I also picked up stitches along the lace panel to work the top part. That, plus the sleeve and the Elephant blanket, puts most of my size 7 circulars in use. I say "most" because I think I have another somewhere. That won't stop me from getting more in case of emergencies or something.

Oh yeah. The sweater. This time, I only got 247 stitches instead of 250. I did not rip it back. I increased three more evenly spaced along the next row. The hell with it. If i didn't blog about it, no one would ever know. (And since I have practically no readers, that means pretty much no one knows anyway).

There is also the Elephant blanket, but that's nothing to see yet either. All in good time.

That was Fun!

Sadly, Poppy's Sheep Blanket is finished. It was a kick to knit, and now it's over. Kirby helped me take a picture:



Oh, well. Plenty more going on in Bunny's knitting bag. I've got about about six inches a week going on the purple scarf. I've got the second blue ribbed sock started. I've got the March sock club sock started. I've got a tiger sock going. All of the pieces parts for Poppy's sweater are done and I could finish in a couple hours if I felt like sewing it up. I have a hard time sewing a nice seam. I normally just do it however, and it shows. But this is for someone else, so I want to do it correctly, so I'm going to have to teach myself some finishing techniques. Lucky for Poppy (not like he cares, but I do), I have something like 50 books with finishing demos in them. We'll be OK.

I tried to take a week off from the teal sweater, but I only made it five days. I am going to need some simple, portable stuff to do at some upcoming seminars, so I cast on a sleeve.

No, it is not rude to knit during these things:

1. It's a video, so I won't be distracting the speakers.
2. Nearly everyone there (I can say from experience) is going to be reading the paper anyway.
3. Those who are not reading the paper will be fooling around with their blackberries.
4. If you are not convinced, then please explain to me why knitting is more rude than #2 or #3. Also, since I have to go to get credits for maintaining my bar license, i.e., it's mandatory, and since none of it is going to be directly relevant to the tiny sub-niche of the very specialized area in which I practice (and no such courses are offered), please explain to me why I should suffer when no one else is.
5. I can't just sleep. I snore. That would be a distraction to everyone else.
6. If I wanted to pay attention, which I don't, I could knit and pay attention at the same time.

It's time to cast on something for The Bean. I haven't decided what, yet, but I have a shopping bag full of pretty pretty yarn to choose from.

It sucks to have a job

Whoooo! Tough day Friday. A lot of clock-watching. I couldn’t wait for the work day to be over so I could go home and work on this:




I am utterly and completely charmed. It’s a perfect project. I love the yarn (Debbie Bliss Cashmerino bulky and superbulky). It’s soft and plush and cuddly. I love the color: rich, warm green. I love the little sheepies. I like the black one and the little small one next to the black one and I like the one with the big head up at the top. I like changing colors, and just when I get sick and tired of managing all the color changes and the ends and bobbins hanging off the back, I am done with a little sheepie and can do a few rows of plain, soothing stockinette stitch. Just when that gets dull, it’s time to start another sheepie. I even love the seed stitch border.

Love, love, love.

I stayed up later than usual Thursday night watching el futbol on the DVR because I wanted to finish just one more sheep before bed. And then I got up and finished the last sheepie Friday morning before work while I had my coffee. So now I only have some ends to weave in (ick) and about 10 rows of stockinette and 10 rows of seed stitch and then it will be done! It was horrid being at work when all I could think about was getting home to the sheepie blankie and finishing it.

Also, I'm done with the teasing.

Behold the Red Lace Scarf

It is ethereal! It is soft! It drapes! It lies flat! It no longer looks like ass! I just might do some more lace someday.

And now we wait

So. My blocking wires came. I washed them in soapy water to get any traces of machine oil off, and I dried them, and I got the red lace scarf all wet in a clean sink full of cool water, and I squeezed out the excess and I threaded the wires through the edges of the wet scarf and I took some measurements and I placed my pins and I gave the whole thing a big ole stretch and here we are:

And when it's dry, we'll know. Nothing else to do until then. Still nothing to see.

I finished The Bean's seed stitch hat. As usual, it looks too big, but it's cute.

I wound the March sock club yarn so it's all ready to go:

We went to the yarn store last weekend to buy yarn for Poppy and The Bean, and I told my girlfriends I was sick of the teal sweater and I was going to take a week off from working on it. Then this thing happened and I needed to have some mindless and simple knitting to work on, so I picked it up on Thursday and, well, in taking a week off from it, I ended up finishing the bottom part:

Yeah. I'm a big ole liar. Poppy's sweater has two sleeves and a back, the blue sock has a heel and part of a gusset, the tiger socks have a cuff, and Poppy's sheep blanket has one slightly off-looking sheep. I'm grumpy and I hate everything, and I think I need to go to the yarn store to buy more yarn. I can't get into bed with chocolate and Pellegrino because the red lace scarf is on the bed. That may have been a bad choice in retrospect.

This is Bullshit (Again)

So I'm knitting away happily on a hat for The Bean. It's a cute little seed stitch number and it looks all lovely in that pretty STR in "rose quartz." Seed stitch is a little tedious, but I'm loving the way it looks. And I get to the part where I have to make decreases for the top, and I encounter this in the pattern:

SK2P

This term is not defined. However, "SKP" is: Slip, knit, pass slipped stitch over.

Bunny reasons her way through it. SK2p must mean slip, knit 2, pass slipped stitch over the two knitted stitches. And so I do and I get to the end of the row and I have 62 stitches. But I'm supposed to have 56 stitches. So I tink a row and contemplate where I went wrong.

Eureka! SK2P means slip, knit 2 together, pass slipped stitch over.

So I give that a go and I think it's not going to work but it turns out that the problem is that I can't count and in the end I come up with 56 stitches like I'm supposed to and all is well.

Breathing in, I am a flower. Breathing out, I am fresh.

Designers and pattern writers, can we please all agree that knitters should not have to intuit the meaning of abbreviations? That lists of abbreviations and their definitions should be comprehensive enough to actually cover all the abbreviations used in the patterns?

I shouldn't need a manifesto to cover this obvious point but, well, there you go.