Finishing up

Last night, while watching a cable special on Fifa World Cup 2006, I finished the knitting part of Froggy. I was so engrossed in watching Forza Azzuri beat Les Bleus (again) that neither The Man nor I noticed Yarn Bandit taking a big dump on the rug not four feet in front of us, and less than 10 minutes after returning from a walk, I might add. What's a fuzzy little guy have to do to get any attention around here?


I went to the eye doctor today, and after an earnest but depressing discussion about bifocals (not yet, not yet), I hadn't the life force in me to sew seams. I could knit, but not seam. Still, I wanted a project that would give me great joy to finish, and so I completed...

...the blue mohair hat. This yarn is lovely. The photo isn't at all up to the beauty of the color. I do love the dyer at Mountain Yarns. However, I am not sorry to be done with this. I did not enjoy working with mohair. It was hairy and sticky and slow going, even with slippery needles. The pattern I used called for a band of cables to go around the bottom, but I ran out of yarn for that, so it's a plain 3x2 rib. Pretty, but not what I had in my head when I started.

The good news is have I have two more skeins of this mohair--one in a raspberry red and one in lilac. Maybe if I use one strand of the mohair along with one strand of a nice plain wool in a matching color, it will be easier to work with and give me better stitch definition plus some fuzziness. Maybe not. This is art, not science, and no one goes to jail if it doesn't turn out right. Still, though, I am done with the mohair for now. The rest can sit in the stash. I have some deadline knitting to do and Froggy to finish.

All Froggy, All the Time

I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Froggy's fronts and back are finished, her shoulder seams are sewn, her sleeves are knitted, the fiddly little cabled bit around the neck is done, and all we have left are:

1. sewing the fiddly little cabled bit around the neck to the top of the back


2. picking up stitches around the front edge and knitting two inches of edging


3. sewing in the sleeves


4. weaving in ends


5. blocking

This is doable this week. I can do #1 and some of #2 tonight, finish #3 and #4 by Thursday night, do #5 on Friday, and it will be dry and ready to wear on Sunday or Monday. At last.

I will, of course, be working on smaller portable projects during the commute and at knitting circle on Tuesday, but otherwise, I am ready for Froggy to be finished, and so I am on a push to get her done.

By the way, a commenter asked about by use of the word "frog." No, it is not a made-up cuss word, although frogging puts knitters in a cussing sort of mood. Frogging is the act of ripping back knitting (because you rip-it, rip-it). That, and the answers to many other questions, as well as obscure ramblings that don't fit anywhere else, can be found here on Dirtbunny's FAQ page (including a bit on why in the world Bunny thinks she needs a FAQ page).

Uh oh. Kirby and The Man are back from evening walk a little early. It's trash day, so maybe there was some trash can trauma.

The sock club

I finished the March sock club socks a few minutes ago. The first one had its good moments and its bad ones, but the second one went much better because I knew, without measuring, that I needed five repeats on the leg and five repeats on the foot and I knew how to handle the migrating stitch markers during the heel gusset. Plus: green. So goodbye, march sock!







The July sock club sock arrived this week, so it isn't at all too early to be done with March. Here, by the way, is my famous cookie box full of leftover sock yarn destined to become mini-socks:

There's some good stuff in there, but the oldest is the Lorna's Laces in "camouflage" so I suppose we all know that means Bunny "has to" do the camo minis next.

By the way, I seem to have lost my badly bent size 1 metal KnitPicks DPN. It was so bent that I banished it, and yet now that I don't remember where I banished it to, I feel a sense of loss.

Yes, it's true. I go to therapy every week, and I take my meds faithfully. I'm still bonkers.

Check out the mini mittens, finished a few minutes ago. Now I am going to play with my March sock. The July sock club sock is coming soon, and I don't like to have too many sock club socks stacked up in the on-deck circle at once.

Four, finally

Looks like I didn't completely finish my big mess. Here is the last thing I cleaned up from the pile:

It's a red The Man sweater, in Lamb's Pride, which is a single ply wool and mohair blend. The fact that it's a single is giving an interesting texture to the piece and makes me glad I went for another plain stockinette, since it seems that's what this yarn most wants to be.

Here at the close of the bell is the state of the mess:

That little bit of fair isle there in the back on the dish towel doesn't count because it's drying after blocking. It has to stay out. You can't see it very well anyway on account of the flamingo wind chimes hanging from the light fixture. Yeah, yeah, I'm going to put them back outside at some point.

So what exactly do we have in the last remnants of the pile?

There's patterns and doodads and books, of course, but let's talk about the knitting. On the left, we have a pair of child-size (I hope) mittens from green Jelli Beenz acrylic leftover from the ridiculous green hat. I taught someone how to knit mittens last week and these just sort of happened. I need about 45 minutes to an hour to finish the last one.

And over on the right we have a blue and white v-neck cable sweater, which I think of as a tennis sweater, and tennis makes me think of Bud Collins, so it's a Bud Collins sweater. What a skeevy old geezer he is. But the sweater makes me happy.

In the front we have the second March sock club sock, cuff done and all set up and ready to do five repeats of the pattern before starting the heel gusset. It has been about a week since I touched this, and now I find that it's the one piece I've wanted to be knitting on all along. Sigh. That's what comes from having so many goddamned things on the needles at once. I have trouble keeping my priorities straight.

Bunny has a big stressful week coming up, which means she'll need the knitting but won't have the time she wants to do it.

Thrilling Number Three

Yes, there's more. This is the beginning of a mulberry knee sock. I had to trade in the original mulberry yarn because I only had three and I needed four. I like calling them the mulberry knee socks, so they're keeping that name.




This is a little chunk of Fred, and there's a cast-on bit of Fred Prime. Don't worry. All will be revealed.

P.S. I have two inches to go on the back of Froggy. Lots of boring stockinette stitch at this point, so I'm dawdling.

Aaaannd the second one

Here's some more. A tiger sock to match the other tiger sock:



A blue mohair hat that has started being less sucky to knit now that I've switched to more slippery needles:

And now the big mess is ever so slightly smaller:

Post the first

While Bunny takes a break from the interminable weaving in of ends, I bring you

Ta Da

The Elephant Blanket, seen from the wrong side with some of the finishing and all of the embroidery done. There are three more border sections to do and some additional embellishments, but I have to say that I'm getting pretty good at intarsia.

Bunny's Big Mess

So this is what Dirtbunny's dining room table looks like today (please note that Bunny is always under surveillance by a certain you-know-who):




There is so much yarn and yarn-related stuff on it that you almost can't see the coffee stain on the tablecloth. The Man, bless him, is quite tolerant of this kind of thing, for which I am quite grateful.

Here it is from the other side:


Today, while The Man handles some urgent yard work and Bunny handles some urgent inside-the-house work, I will be stopping by the Big Mess to try to make some sense of it and to show you what's on the needles.

"Teal" sweater heartbreak

She don't fit. Her bodice is too short and calls inappropriate attention to The Girls, and not in a good way. (A boss of mine once expressed his discomfort with enforcing dress codes [particularly a pantyhose requirement] thusly: I'm looking at your legs, and I don't like what I see, is not a conversation I want to have.) I really want this sweater to work, and there was only a four-row bit where I could have tried to lengthen it, and four rows was not enough to block out the problem.

So I have frogged the goddamn thing. I've spent the last two days (on a yarn crawl and) frogging it back, then reknitting the four rows into about three inches, and I had hoped to divide the top for fronts and back but it turns out I can't read so I ended up with the wrong number of stitches and so now I have to frog a couple hundred stitches again and, well, I decided to take a little break. Her new name is "Froggy," which sounds better to me than "teal" sweater anyway.

Truly, the two days during which I convinced myself that it wasn't right and something had to be done, and settled on the decision to frog, was much worse than the actual experience of frogging and starting over from the half-way point. If only I could read everything would be hunky dory.

Update

Let's recap. I have washed the purple lace scarf and it turns out that it's a good thing I stopped when I did because it grew when wet and is plenty long by any standards. Also, not that you can tell from the photos, but it looks pretty good.

Also, this is done. Front:

Back:

The Man sez, uuuuhh, is that for Poppy? Isn't it cute how hard he tries? No, dear. Poppy might look good in it, but his father might object (I say, never having met Poppy's dad, but figuring it's a safe assumption given what I know about other dads and how they feel about their sons wearing dresses). It's for The Bean.

Und hier ist el tigre:

One down, one to go.

I've got half of the chart done on the Elephant Blanket, but no photos yet, and I got me a one-armed sweater that I might possibly finish this week. And I turned the heel on the March sock and engaged in plenty of lustful yarn activities, such as choosing patterns and researching yarn and such. I've got a pile of mohair in three different colors that I don't know what to do with. Hat, maybe. Possibly a scarf depending on yardage. But what I really want to do is buy yarn for all the sweaters I have planned in my head. I made a deal with myself. No buying sweater yarn until the teal sweater is done and the first bit of The Man's red sweater is on the needles. Yarn for socks and baby projects, as always, doesn't count.

Stash Enhancement

A few weeks ago, I noticed that I had a book that I hadn't read yet, so I, well, I read it. Wow. Fabulously boring sentence. Whaddaya know? Wendy knits has her a blog! Duh. It seems to start out as a blog and then becomes a book with many (at least two) of these knitbloggers. And so Ms. Wendy is also an employee of Uncle Sam here in Our Nation's Capital, and she likes the same LYS that I like. And so I look at her blog and I decide I like it, so I start back through the archives and, well, and I mean this in the best possible way, but Wendy sucks. Because of her, I now have this:



That's not entirely accurate. Some of that is "teal" yarn from the "teal" sweater. Let's have a better look:



Excuse me, Kirby. I love you too but I want to go play with my yarn right now.




That's my new yarn. In there is the Colinette ab-fab kit that I bought because Wendy did one and I thought it was purty. The kit is not in stock, so I had to order it, which means one trip to order and one trip to pick it up. There's a lot of strange and wonderful stuff in that Colinette bag. I'm a little afraid of it right now, but I'm sure you'll be hearing more about it later.

Also, there are four balls of Zephyr lace weight. Because Wendy did a Summer of Lace in 2005 and although I am still recovering from my little lace experiment, I somehow got it into my head that I ought to be doing more lace. Clearly and obviously in collusion with Wendy, the LYS had its Zephyr out in all kinds of pretty colors. Bunny's colors. So I suppose I will be doing some more lace at some point, like I need that kind of stress.

There is also some silly fuzzy novelty yarn that I am going to use to edge the felted dog bed I am going to make out of my leftover emerald Manos del Uruguay.

WTF, you ask? See, it's Wendy's fault. She knits kitty beds for her cat, and, hey, I could probably do that only I don't have a cat, but I do have dogs, and they are only twice as big as--I mean only a little bigger than--her cat and just because I said felting is stupid and pointless doesn't mean that maybe I intended never to try it out and it's only a dog bed so if my felting sucks, no one will care, and Manos isn't really that expensive.

Manos. The hands of fate. You knew you were thinking it, Food Guy.

There are also five skeins there that are going to be socks one day. That is also Wendy's fault, because everyone knows you can't go into a LYS without buying sock yarn. That just wouldn't be right.

So you can see why Wendy is both my new best cyber friend (even though she doesn't know it) and a great big hoser, all at once, and Bunny's on-deck circle is getting a little crowded.

But Never Fear!

Projects are nearing the finish line:



The Bean's dress needs a seam (although I finished most of it waiting for my photos to upload), a ribbon, a button, and a good blocking, and that's it.

I've got most of a tiger sock.




The "teal" sweater has a bottom, one and 1/20th of a sleeve, a back, and one and 1/3 fronts. It could possibly be finished before too much longer, depending on how interesting season 2 of Battlestar Gallactica is.



Does the Yarn Bandit help me take photos?

No. He's busy.