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? 

Snow Days = Finishment

Since I've been trapped in snow of apparently biblical proportions, and freed from the necessity of earning a living during that time, I have had much more time than usual for knitting.  I was happily knitting away on the Viola scarf, and I finished it, but there were umpteen hundred ends to weave in, so I set it aside and picked up Juno Regina.  I worked the boring part mindlessly for a while, decided to take a measurement, and discovered I was finished with the boring part.  So's then I switched to the lace part, and I knocked off four charts of lace in a day, and then I blocked it, and then I took it outside, and that led to this:

Isn't that pretty?  Here's a detail:

Yeah, so close-up, those are only diamond-ish, not diamonds.  Who cares?


And then I thought, Man!  I am getting really tired of the Bird's Nest Shawl.  I want it done.  So I finished it:

As you can see, if you're into noticing that sort of thing, the Bird's Nest Shawl has fallen victim to Yarn Bandit's hair.  I know it was him because he likes to sit on my lap when I knit and this was a large item that kept brushing against him.  The washing and blocking helped a lot, but it's still hairy.  That's OK.  I tried it out this morning, and it works.

And then I thought, Crikey!  Champions League resumes next week!  I better finish the Viola scarf so I can wear it during their match with Bayern Munich and impart good karma!  So I wove in umpteen hundred ends and finished it:

That really is a nice shade of violetty/purple, just like the Viola kits, although it photographs blue.  And it also features the white and gold of their logo, and the red of their third kits, which they wore this weekend when they got clobbered by Samp.  I am concerned that the Viola scarf might be broken.  Either that or it's a bad karma scarf that makes teams lose.  Or maybe it's like the Bianconeri Scarf of Drunken Champions League Woe, which works sometimes, and other times not so much.

And then I thought, well, my oldest remaining project is the November sock club socks.  I hates it and I wants it to go away, and I'm a bit compulsive, so the way to make disagreeable knitting go away is to finish it:

The pattern is nice, but a little fussy.  The problem here is the yarn.  The dyer over at Blue Moon likes the effect when you take a multi-colored yarn and overlay the whole thing with black.  It's a nice idea, I suppose, but in practice, it creates a slightly sticky feeling yarn that turns your hands purple because the black dye rubs off.  I've had purple fingers for a week.  I hate that.  I want my hands to be clean!  I may grow to like these socks once they've been washed a half-dozen times and I find out what color they really are. 

And that's it for the sock club.  I decided not to renew this year.  Which is not to say that I am no longer knitting socks, cos I am.  Here is one that happened to be handy when I decided to take photos:

It's brown, and the dye stays in the yarn.  However, I dropped a stitch in the middle of a cable, so I've had to rip them back and inch or so.  Bummer.  Now I have to carefully thread the needles through the stitches again, get them all lined up and purty, figure out where the row begins (shoulda thought of that before I ripped it off the needles, huh?), and THEN figure out which row of the pattern I'm on.  Shudder.

La la la lace

I know, I know. Not lace. Those are socks for a nephew.




Now here's some lace:

The flit and float scarf, nearing completion. Well, about 2/3 done, anyway. Yeah. You can't really see it at all. It's based on stockinette stitch, so it's curling in on itself, but when I block it, everything will be wonderful, right?

Hey! What's that next to the flitandfloat?

That's a fair isle sock, baby, in a Scandinavian motif with a Latvian braid. I can do Latvian braids now. That means I can do Latvian mittens if I want. *cackles*

And the piece de resistance (I wish I knew how to make diacritical marks. That just looks wrong without them.):

The Kimono shawl is about 3/4 done. I am very proud of it, so far. When it's done and blocked, I'll have to show you the lace up close. Maybe The Man can be persuaded to model it.

The Undertoe socks for my SIL are also nearly done, and I've started some plain brown socks that I think are for my other nephew, but we'll have to see if I have enough yarn for a pair first, and I won't know until I've finished one whether I have enough for two. The brown yarn was yoogly in the skein, but it's knitting up very nicely. Plus, it's soft.

I hate the Ziggy socks. They suck. But I'll finish them or die trying, or my name isn't Dirtbunny and I don't spend zillions of dollars a year on therapy.

Running out of Pam Yarn

It's true. I am nearly finished will all of the Pam yarn. I had a fair amount of the Colinette Giotto in "Florentina" left over from the Giotto sweater, which I sent here (they need some money, so send them some), and so I made a scarf, which I also sent there, and I still had some left over. It occurred to me that I was giving away all of the Pam yarn and keeping nothing for myself, so I decided to make a simple garter stitch scarf with the last of the Giotto, and keep it for me. And here it is:







Nothing special there about the knitting; this one was about the yarn.





And Pam had started a baby blanket for Poppy, and I finished it after she died so Poppy would have it, and I had . . . . . .a lot of left over yarn. So I made another baby blanket. I finished too late to send it here, so I have put it aside for now. Another opportunity is bound to come up at some point. Badly photographed, but here it is:




That would be a delicate, pale yellow in there, not that you can tell. This I did from a chenille yarn in a traditional fan and feather pattern. I think I chose wisely. The texture of the yarn did not at all obscure the pattern, and the stripes set off the waviness of the pattern very nicely.





Now I have three balls of a beautiful fingering weight merino in red (colorway name is "honk." HONK! Isn't that great? That Pam....) left from the Pam yarn. I have had some angst over this





Angst? No..... Really? *snicker*








SHUT UP! I had some angst over this yarn because I had an idea and I couldn't figure out how to execute it. But now I have an executable plan and am almost ready to move forward.






And...... here are the Ziggy socks:

Umm, yeah. So the pattern said I could divide the ball of yarn in half and knit both parts of the zigzag from the same yarn if I started at different colors in the dye pattern. That did not work. There was not enough contrast to show off the zigzag. I needed another colorway, and how. So I went to my favorite website for discounted and discontinued yarn, and I looked to see if they had any Noro Kuryeon Sock. And they did. Now, if you didn't know, Noro does not name its colors. Noro gives its colors very unhelpful numbers. And the color combinations are odd (in the best possible way) so it can be really difficult to picture how anything made from Noro is going to turn out. And since it as going to be so hard to visualize the end result, guess what?

chicken butt

*sigh* *ignores* Guess which color I chose? I chose the one that said "image not available." I ordered yarn in a color sight unseen. How's that for the opposite of compulsive? *beams with pride* And it is turning out just fine. And Champions League Group Stage has started, so lots of awesome knitting time coming up.

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.

Goodbye Tofu Socks

The tofu socks are finished.


They are in The Man's Christmas stocking. The Man's Christmas stocking is nice and bulge-y. Bunny's stocking is empty. Bunny is harping on the fullness of The Man's stocking in the hopes that The Man will make the connection and realize that:

1. Bunny's stocking is empty.
2. Bunny wants something in her stocking.
3. No one else lives here.
4. If anything gets put in Bunny's stocking, The Man is going to have to do it.
5. By Christmas morning.

He's not a stupid man, but neither is he a subtle man.

Do you know what this means? It means that Bunny only has two projects going, beagle blanket and purple cardigan. I'd like to point out that just because you may be working both sides of a cardigan front simultaneously on the same needle from two balls of yarn in an attempt to ensure that they turn out symmetrical and the same size doesn't mean that this will actually happen unless you pay attention to what you are doing and alternate sides. If you just work the same side back and forth over and over, it will end up much larger than the untouched, unworked side. Then you'll have to do make-up rows and measure them and shit, which you hate, which is why you did it this way in the first place.

I am going into the stash to pick out something nice for myself, I am going to start some fair isle socks, and maybe I'll pull out some of the leftovers and do a hat or something that I can actually finish soon and feel like I accomplished something.