*blows raspberry*

Just in time for preliminary World Cup call-ups, I present to you the most recent of the 2010 WC Collection by Dirtbunny:

The red and yellow there is for La Furia Roja (Spain).  The good part is finished, but I still have to weave in ends.  The green, white, and red is for El Tri (Mexico).  The blue and white is for Los Catrachos (Honduras).  It was supposed to have one more blue stripe but I ran out of yarn.  Aaaaaannnnd, the white one, which I started yesterday, is for the All Whites (New Zealand).

The All Whites got their name thusly:  The NZ national rugby team is the All Blacks, on account of their black uniforms.  When the NZ national football team came along, they wore white uniforms, hence, the All Whites.

I don't know if I'm happy about any of these.  Clarabelle keeps telling me that the Spanish kit this year is more black and red than yellow and red; the Honduras kit is not going to resemble the Honduran flag as it traditionally has; and the Mexican kit has a much heavier emphasis on the green than my rendition.  Clarabelle sez that no one would recognize any of the scarves I've done (except possibly the Albicelestes, for Argentina).  Clarabelle sez I am a failure as a designer and it probably would have been cheaper to buy team scarves than to buy yarn to make scarves, and the purchased ones would look better.  Clarabelle sez that if I can't even stack colors together in straight lines to make a decent-looking scarf, then how can I possibly expect the pink cable cardi (which I "designed" myself from a book of standard patterns) to turn out properly.  Clarabelle is some kinda pain in the ass, isn't she?

The FIGC announced the preliminary Azzurri squad yesterday.  We are most displeased.   The good news is that Idiot Il Mister (who has been testing me for a while and has now achieved official DeadToMe status) is so effing predictable that I scored 28 out of 30 in The Offside's WC Prediction Game.  Well, actually, I sacrificed JoeBeppe Rossi for, well, guess, but I never really expected it to happen, so the highest score I could have gotten was 29.  (If you care, I had Legrottaglie instead of Candreva, and I am not disappointed to have gotten that one wrong.)  Which means Dirtbunny, renowned football expert based on her lengthy association with sophisticated tactical analysis since October 2009, only missed one of Il Mister DeadToMe's picks.  



No, I've changed my mind.  This is not good news.  This is bad news.  This is very bad news.


Dirtbunny's list did not contain her assessment of the 30 best players, or the 30 players who, in combination, would be most likely to bring home the big trophy, or even her personal favorites.  Dirtbunny's list was based entirely on guessing what Il Mister DeadToMe would do, and it was distressingly accurate.  I mean, I love these guys, these Beloved Heroes from Days of Yore,  but on the whole they are old.  They are tired.  They are slow.  They are/have been injured this year.  They haven't been playing very much even for their club teams.  Or some combination of all of that. 


*sigh*


I could go on and on, but I'll do one brief rant and then I'll call it a day.

THERE IS NO WAY ANYONE CAN POSSIBLY CONVINCE ME THAT QUAGS IS SUPERIOR TO ADP IN ANY WAY WHATSOEVER, AND CERTAINLY NOT IN SKILL, TALENT, CURRENT FORM, TEAM COHESIVENESS, INTERNATIONAL EXPERIENCE, OR LEADERSHIP.  NO FUCKING WAY.  OF ALL THE INEXPLICABLE CHOICES, WHY QUAGS?  WHY?  WHYWHYWHYWHYWHYWHY?

Not Done After All

I thought I was, but I'm not.  Can you see the problem?

*going off to have tantrum now*

OK, I'm back.  Now, please check out these two photos of ADP:

that's David Trezeguet on the bench, and Lorenzo Ariaudo (with the ridiculous hair) in the background looking on

What lesson can be gleaned from these photos and applied to my knitting problem?

Figured it out yet?

The answer is:  Some of the most horrible, unthinkable mistakes (that hat, that awful, awful hat) can still, despite all appearances, be fixed (the hat is detachable).

I can fix this.  I'm not quite out of yarn.

Bunny is Forced to Clean Up Her Mess

This was the dining room table on Monday, after the weekend yarncrawl but before the new yarn came in the mail. My plan was to leave it like this until I knitted my way through it, and see how long that would take. Well NOW WE'LL NEVER KNOW because Mister MeaniepantsThe Man told me I had to clean it up so he could use the table for work. Snort! This is how it has always been. Dirtbunny spreads her wings and decides to live a little and the cruel cruel world gives her a smack upside the head [Southern pronunciation: Upsahd duh hay-ud] I am stifled and oppressed when all I want is the freedom to be myself. *sniffle*


So, I am not happy about this. Here's the stupid Giotto sweater, post-repairs. It turned out OK considering it was made by an imprisoned soul.

And here is the mohair cowl. It's fuzzy and kinda weird. But the mohair is gone.

And this is the only person who will ever understand Dirtbunny.

And this is a SIL Undertoe sock before I had to rip it out because I fucked it up by not doing the heel ribbing. You can't really expect someone whose spirit lives in a cage to do any better, can you?

And this is the flit and float butterfly scarf. Butterflies are free to fly away, but Dirtbunny will always be crammed into her little suburban careerwoman (Ha!) bullshit mold, suppressing herself so as not to disturb the sensibilities of others.

And here is the Giotto scarf, posed on top of the purple scarf thingy. It was supposed to use up all the Giotto yarn, but guess what?

I FAILED

*sigh*

Oops! I think I hear the warden coming. Better hide my spoon so he doesn't know I'm trying to dig out. Gotta go.

Giotto Woe and the Cure for Giotto Woe

"We have the technology. We can rebuild her."



But before we get to that, this is how The Man and I enjoyed the Peace Cup final, which the Bianconeri lost by trying to shoot penalty kicks with their heads up their butts. Even ADP. Especially ADP. We started out with a bottle of an Italian sparkling red wine and a July sock and when the wine made the July sock too hard, we switched to a Stitch and Pitch square. The sock and square are now done, and I don't remember what the wine was, which is fine because it was too sweet for us. We'll stick to Prosecco. Only 9 more days to the beginning of the Serie A season.

And that brings me to Giotto woe. Remember how one of the fronts was too long? I knew it was coming, but I decided to ignore it instead of fixing it while it would still be easy to fix it. Sometimes when you try to embrace the idea that not everything has to be perfect all the time, you get scrooed end up with something that the compulsive part of you cannot live with. So to fix the Giotto sweater, I had to disassemble the Giotto sweater:

Not fun. Not fun at all. But my new replacement front is one the needles and might be done this week if there's anything good on the toob I get around to it. I thought I was done and I almost put the pattern book in the recycle bin. I'm glad I'm such a fucking pack rat I didn't.

Instead, because I didn't use up all the Giotto yarn, I started a Giotto scarf, which I now can't finish until the Giotto sweater is repaired, because I'm worried that I'll run out of yarn. This is ridiculous, of course. I have ripped out something and am using the yarn to make something smaller which means it will use less yarn, even with what I'll need for the re-edging and re-seaming.

This means that the Giotto scarf is in limbo, even though it doesn't need to be. And how, you may ask, does Dirtbunny distract herself from all this needless mental suffering? Cmon. You know the answer.

She retreats to her boudoir for a long sulk, because she's a big baby.

WRONG! She gets a wicked case of startitis. And so, behold:

Haha! Just kidding. This is actually an old project, a lace mohair cowl, which is almost mindless monkey knitting, and it would be done already if I didn't hate working with mohair. This is the last of the ancient mohair from days of yore. I don't think we'll be getting any more of that at the LYS.

Psych again! This is the March sock club sock, which is another not quite new project. This is the kind of thing you do four or eight rows on right before you go to sleep (instead of reading which is what normal people do).

Let's get to some real startitis projects shall we?

Numero Uno:

Here we have a lace scarf in lavender with a butterfly motif. Really! Can't you see the butterflies? OK, well, I just started so it doesn't have butterflies yet. The hard part was gettting the provisional cast-on right. A provisional cast-on leaves you with live stitches that you can pick up and knit onto later, which makes it great for adding an edging to, say, a butterfly scarf, so the edging looks the same on both ends when the scarf is worn. And also, a nephew sock. What you see there is how much sock you can knit when mildly sedated and riding in the car around the Beltway to a futbol game while giving The Man directions (because Dirtbunny is presumed to know where everything is, even places she's never been to before.) I'll have to compare the newphew sock circumference to the nephew foot circumference I got in the email today to see if we have a match.

This is a Ziggy sock. It's a toe-up jobbie. I am using Noro Kureyon Sock. Everyone loves Noro Kureyon. I dunno. It seems pretty itchy to me. We'll see.

This is a SIL sock. She picked the yarn. (I think she picked this yarn.) I'm using the March pattern from last year. If I remember correctly, it was a fun knit, and this is good yarn, so yay.

Good gravy! There's more? Yes there is. This is a baby blanket from Pam yarn in a traditional feather and fan pattern, which mind end up being completely oscured by the yarn's chenille texture. What-ev. It's going to be stripey, and the stripes will show off the waviness of the pattern, if nothing else.

This is not the endof the Pam yarn. I still have three beautiful skeins of red merino in sock weight. I had intended to use the yarn to knit a seed-stitch scarf for Ray-Ray, because he loved Pam too and she was heavy into seed stitch and its variations, so I thought it might be nice for him to have something that was sort of hers. Problem is, I mentioned this to Ray-Ray (to see if he would be OK with it) before I realized that it was sock weight yarn and I don't have enough for a scarf. I could make him three red socks, but Pamie probably wouldn't have made him socks. I could make a pretty, girly lace scarf, but I don't think that's Ray-Ray's thang. I have no idea what I'm going to do with it now. Hat? Dunno. Red mittens? Maybe. I'll have to ask him.

Are you wondering about the kimono shawl? It's in the drawer. I'm at the point where I'm waiting for more yarn to arrive in the mail and when it gets here, I'm going to have to blend the new with the old to obscure any dye-lot variations.

And that's how Dirtbunny forgets about how incompetent she is her most recent major fuckup her little mishap with the Giotto sweater. And that brings us to Tiki Tinkle Time, so I have to go now. I'm going to hit "publish" without proofreading. What's the worst that can happen?

Not a good day, again (sigh)

So it's a work at home day and I'm all jazzed because I think I've finished something and then it occurs to me, Gee, Bunny, the judge mentions all this stuff that wasn't on the tape and so I dig through the file and discover that THERE ARE SIX MORE TAPES and I am nowhere near finished. Also, it is cold and there are no cookies to go with my latte and Juve is late in posting the call sheet for tomorrow and no one seems to think that ADP will be called up to the Azzurri for next week's world cup qualifier against Montenegro.

Yesterday also had its problems. I had to do some travel stuff I DID NOT WANT TO DO and I got all worked up about it for no good reason. But I finished it, and then I cheered myself up by buying new glasses (more later when they are ready) and a new rug. However, in the process of melting my credit card on these enjoyable pursuits, I tromped all around the Golden Triangle in the WRONG SHOES and my poor Bunny toes are still suffering.

But Ima knittin'. So it's all good. (See how hip I am?)

Two weeks ago, I finished the crimson sweater. I have had a devil of a time getting a decent photo of it, so I haven't bothered to share, although I've worn the sweater a bunch already. At work, they are all probably already thinking "There goes that crazy bitch Dirtbunny in her red sweater again." I don't care. I love it.

So here's the best photo of me in the sweater:

The Man took this. I asked him to take my picture and he did. He didn't understand that the point was to show off the sweater and not the Dirtbunny. No need to notice the liquor bottles on the counter with the onions. (The creme de cassis has been deemed potable and so I'm poting it.) And, hey, I guess the white stripe on Kirby's e-collar is reflective.

Here's the best picture I have of the actual sweater:

My hair looks pretty good! And I'm sure if you disregard the glare from the flash, you can see the lovely cables. Bonus points if you can see the surprise guest over to my right.

That's right. Kirby. His motto: Whither thou goest, I will go. What a good boy. His birthday is coming up, so I hope you got him something nice that won't make him itchy.

My biggest accomplishment of the week is that I finished the September sock club socks, without running out of yarn. It was touch and go. I finished with about three inches to spare. Three inches, and that is all. Whew! Here they are sharing the sunshine with our little urinary monster and a pair of minis made from the leftover July yarn.

I'm pretty sure that my next big project is the Decimal cardigan from the current issue of Knitty. I already have a sweater's worth of pink cotton blend in DK weight that I bought for my birthday when there was no blue to be had and I've already knit and washed my gauge swatch.

I have ten repeats to go on the Flower Basket shawl--I mean potholder. I told The Man I was making a Flower Basket shawl and his brain managed to process that as "Dirtbunny is knitting a potholder" so now I call it the "potholder." You would not believe how smart and competent he is in the non-knitting aspects of life but "potholder" geez. I despair. Oh: the last repeat on the potholder took me about 2 hours to do, and it gets 20 stitches wider with every repeat, and it requires concentration so no TV knitting and no social time knitting unless I want to rip it back and weep a lot, so this is going to take a while. It's bigger than the last time you saw it, which means

~all together now~

IT LOOKS LIKE [MORE] ASS!

The March sock club sock is due any time. Wait! There goes the postman. Please hold while I go check.

[cue the girl from ipanema]

[Your call is important to us. Please continue to hold.]

[more the girl from ipanema]

Nope. Not today. Still, there is no chance I will finish November and January before March gets here. November is wound and ready to go, however.

Aaaaaannnnnnnnddd, it's been more than two weeks since I've been to the vet which must mean it's time to go to the vet, because they were so busy looking at Kirby's itchy feet that they forgot his biennial bordatella vaccination so I get to make another trip! Hooray! Kirby looooooves the vet. Off we go.