Best Yarn Evar

The Bean blanket, he is done.  No pictures.  I think it's fair if Refried Bean's mom gets to see it before you do.


And here's the finished Bafana Bafana WCS. 

Still no guesses about which country Bafana Bafana represent?  I wove in all those ends and no one will hazard a guess for me?  Hmph.

Grr

I have just finished paying a buttload of bills, including an escrow shortfall, and I am very cranky.  Very  cranky.  However, the knitting goes on.

First up, we have two socks, both plain mindless monkey knitting and suitable for commuting.

Please, please.  Try to contain your excitement.  You are disturbing the others.

Next up, a Bean Blanket for the Refried Bean, poorly represented here as safety cone orange:

It's lace, and it's pretty.  See?

It looks fancy, but it's not so hard as long as you don't poke a hole in your finger with the lace-tip circular needle.  And there are more socks, a nice brown patterned one that you can't really see at all,  and a blue lace patterned one that you can't really see at all.

But wait!  There's more.  I finally started the Azzurri WC scarf.  Tis beautiful, but there's a long way to go (the Azzurri had a friendly last week against the Indomitable Lions from Cameroon, and played like ass in a boring nil-nil draw).  And finalement, I have been working on the pink cabled cardigan for some months now and have yet to finish even one crappy piece.  *sigh*

If I ever finish it, it's going to be lovely.

Isn't "Indomitable Lions" a wonderful team name? 

Yup. Still knitting.

Still learning Photobucket and it's messing up my formatting.  Please be patient.


Anyhoo, Ima knitting socks.  Here are three very exciting pairs:

So you have here your plain blue sock in a child's size, the cuff of a plain self-striping sock in a grown-up size, and the November sock club sock, which is actually a variegated red/green/gray combo and which doesn't photograph well.

And this is La Viola scarf.  They are in the Champions League round of sixteen and their next match is February 17, so I have to be finished by then.   I kinda like them, so they get a scarf, which will be worn during matches for its positive karmic properties.   Now that Adi Mutu has flunked another a drug test, they're gonna need it.  I can't believe I found the proper shade of violet yarn!

This is the beginnings of a secret project for Bean 2.0, who we are expecting to see in June and who we have have recently discovered is a male child.  This yarn is lovely, the color of a ripe papaya (the insides, duh, not the peel).

So that blue bit there was an Azzurri WCS.  Get a good look, cuz I've already ripped it out and started over. And the gray bit is the beginning of a sleeve of a cardi that is going to require steeks.  Steeks are too monstrous to contemplate right now, so I will explain them to you some other time when you're older and can understand better.

And this here?  This here is the big boy:

The telescope is not mine.  No, he does not use it to spy on the Steinmetz daughters across the street!  Gross!  How could you think such a thing?  Plus they've all grown up and gone to college now.  And I don't think their last name is really Steinmetz.  Yup.  This here is the Juno Regina scarf.  I started out loving it.  Now I'm in the interminable monotonous middle section.  If I don't die of boredom, in about 8 more inches, I can go back to fun diamond-patterned lace!  Woohoo!  DISCLAIMER: lace looks like ass before blocking

And it's fucking freezing in here because when the guys took the furnace out of the sun room closet as part of the Hellhole Rehabilitation Project of 2009, they left behind a hole in the floor of the closet that opens directly into the crawlspace, with only a screen and an old furnace filter to block the minus 3* degrees air pouring in from outside.  We're going to fix it, but not this afternoon.  And because it's freezing, my fingers are getting stiff and my feet are starting to hurt and I'm getting really tired of doing this, and I started about 90 minutes ago and have been stumbling through the learning curve ever since. 

*I need to learn the Celsius scale, because all the good football broadcasts give the gameday weather in metric.  Weren't we supposed to convert to the metric system back in the 80s?  Goddamn Republicans.  Oh.  So the translation into Uhmurrican weather is 26 degrees Fahrenheit.

This post powered by cold green tea and the fear of ending up like that guy in "To Build a Fire"

I hope you're sitting down

So I just finished the March socks whilst watching the exciting finale of the Tour de France. I've had my Lance Armstrong fix for the year, and now I'm just sad that's the end of my new secret Swiss boyfriend for a while. And so here are the March socks.



So, on to the May socks, right?







This is going to blow your mind.

I STARTED THE JULY SOCKS BEFORE THE MAY SOCKS.

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I STARTED THE JULY SOCKS BEFORE THE MARCH SOCKS WERE FINISHED.

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I AM WORKING SOCK CLUB SOCKS OUT OF ORDER!

The Earth is still rotating on its axis. I wanted to see what would happen, and all is well. Or I guess it would be more accurate to say all is normal.




So now my oldest project is boring old mindless monkey knitting socks. And my second oldest project is lace:

This is the kimono shawl, worked in sport weight sock yarn. I am not going to have enough, so I'm getting more, and working on a way to obscure any dye lot variation issues. I am pretty confident I'll figure it out. I really like this purple stuff. A buddy made a Baby Surprise Jacket for The Bean from this yarn, and I knew I had to have some.

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By the way, knitting lace with regular yarn is way easier than knitting lace with lace weight yarn. I highly recommend it.

Phobos and Deimos

Secret Projects Phobos and Deimos are complete. This is Phobos, also known as Fred, who has gone to live with Poppy, who should be here any day now.




Have you ever wondered what a dog would look like without ears?:

Hahahahaha! When I said that out loud to The Man, Kirby got startled and left the room.

And here is Deimos, also known as Fred Prime, who is even now en route to The Bean's house. Now that The Bean is here, she is known as Nora.

If I ever get over my bleeping cold, I'll get to visit her. Nora lives at the same house as the original friend of the family Fred. He's about 75-80 pounds, and maybe a little much for sleeping in the crib with a baby, if you're into that sort of thing. So I thought it would be nice to have a smaller version of Fred to cuddle with, especially for Poppy, who doesn't have a real Fred.

Don't you love how the white fiberfill is showing through the black yarn? But Fred is black and so his namesakes are also black.

Laceweight

I have lace weight yarn. Not a lot, but some. Zephyr in five colors. A variegated Australian mohair blend. At least half a ball of Helen's Lace in "Black Purl." I have lace patterns. Books with patterns, and single patterns. I have ideers. Many many ideers. I can make any number of scarves with what I have in stash.

However,

I do not have enough of anything to make a respectable shawl. I want to try to make a shawl. In order to make a shawl, I will have to buy more yarn. This does not make me happy. I was hoping to use up stash.

But enough about my problems. The mommies now have all their baby stuff, so let's take a look, shall we?

Poppy's Stuff

The Bean's Stuff

The Bean gets a longer range because Kirby wanted to help display them. So we have blankets, sweaters, mini-socks, hats, and scarves for the mommies. The Bean's mommy is hoping that The Bean wants to be born today. It's a nice day to be born, so come on out, Bean, and meet your family and get your real name. Poppy, maybe you could stay put just a little longer.

I managed to get out of this baby-knitting frenzy without making a Baby Surprise Jacket.

The In and the Out

I ripped out the badly-done seam on The Bean's sweater and sewed the sleeve back on where it was supposed to be and now we are all done:







By all done, I mean the projects for Poppy and The Bean are all done. The babies are still gestating (at least they were the last I heard) so I met my arbitrary deadline. Good for me. I have pictures, but I thought I'd let the mommies have the loot first.



Silly Bunny. It was really all for Bunny and not so much for the babies. If Bunny had thought about babies for one minute when planning these projects, she would have made them from machine-washable yarn. It's not like I never met a baby before. I know what they do. [Aside for The Man, who doesn't know much about babies: Sweetie, babies make various excretions. It can't be stopped. They aren't culpable; it's just they way things are. Washability is a big advantage.] So apart from the sheer and complete impracticality of it all, I am pleased with how the projects turned out.



Also, this is done:







The fuzzy purple hat. I used one strand of Cascade 220 in a dark purple and one strand of lilac mohair, and here it is. I remain unenchanted by the mohair but--Hey!--I only have one skein left. I give myself permission to take a break from mohair. I have some socks in the works, and a Man sweater, and a secret project. I think my next project will be something fun and frivolous.




I'm actually down one skein this week on the ole inventory. The Bean's sweater took three skeins of Debbie Bliss baby cashmerino, and the hat took two skeins. So that's an output of five. I bought four skeins for socks. It's not sock yarn, but I'm going to use it for socks.



Four in. Five out. The stash is smaller.

Hubris

So Bunny is at knitting circle on Tuesday and The Bean's mom is there, fixin' to attach a sleeve to a baby sweater, and she's being all finicky and precise and The Bean's mom sez she sez "Once I just eyeballed it and one side ended up half an inch lower than the other side."

And so yesterday Bunny took the day off and she finished all of the pieces parts for The Bean's sweater with the seed stitch borders and she is fixin' to attach the sleeves to the sweater. She has carefully marked the center stitch of each sleeve and she matches it up to the shoulder seam and she smooths everything out and commences to sewing. The whole time she is sewing, she remembers what The Bean's mom said and she thought, nah, I got it covered.

And then she gets ready to sew the side seams, and she discovers this:

That's a bit more than a half-inch off. No way can Bunny fudge that. I am going to have to rip it out and do it over. Yarn Harlot frequently discourses about the knitting gods and how they lie in wait to punish knitters who cut corners and get all smug about it. That seam is well and thoroughly done. It is going to take a long time to rip out--way, way, way, way longer than it would have taken if Bunny hadn't been so sure she had it covered.

Ape Arms

From all reports, The Bean is growing at an impressive rate and will be a big, bouncing baby when she is born. If you see The Bean's mother, please do not try to impress her with stories about the 16-pound baby you heard about. Or the 12-pound one. The Bean's mother does not like to dwell on that kind of stuff and yet, all sorts of people are dying to regale her with stories.

The Bean's sweater with the seed stitch bands is coming along nicely:

I had most of a sleeve but, since The Bean's mother is not anticipating that The Bean will have arms like an orangutan (we are expecting more humanoid proportions), I have decided to rip back the ape-armed sleeve and aim for something a little shorter, which means re-proportioning the increases. I also need some buttons. But that means (oh no!) a trip to the yarn store to look for buttons. The horror! The horror!

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.

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.

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.

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.