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"

It's not like I haven't been knitting, yknow

Cos I have been.  I just haven't felt much like writing about it, no one's listening, no one cares, and so forth.  Regardless, I feel the need to show the ether some photographs:

Number One

So this here be some red socks from nice Fleece Artist yarn.  They went to the Old Man.


Number Two

And this be a Baby Surprise Jacket made from leftover yarn that I used to make a Baby Surprise Jacket. 


Number Three

And this here be lace.  Better yet, black lace.  Since lace photographs badly, and black photographs badly, the ass-looking has layers.  This is the Birds Nest Shawl.  It has been on hiatus because I ran out of yarn and had to order more and it was back ordered.  The yardage requirements in the pattern lied.  And you would not believe how well the black shows off dog hair.  *sigh*


Number Four

And lookie!  More lace.  This is the Juno Regina scarf in fabulous aussie mohair blend laceweight.  This is going to be something when it's done and blocked PLUS the aussie laceweight is the oldest yarn in the stash, so that means a double sense of accomplishment.  I am well over half done wth this now, but I'm mired in the center section.  It's 42 inches of a simple vertical lace stripe.  Complicated enough to not be mindless monkey knitting, not complicated enough to be interesting, therefore, tedious as hell.

Purple Lace

Today is Columbus Day, the best day of the year.  Athough we have cloudy, chilly weather this time, that just means that I can make soup and maybe when it's done it won't look like diarrhea to me.  I intend to enjoy myself today.  While The Man completes the vacuuming (Hey!  I dusted, and I did some vacuuming too), here is your periodic yarn-related update.

I have a use for the last of the Pam yarn:

I still have a way to go on this, but the colors are blending nicely, and the scarf is turning out both manly and cuddly at the same time.  I like this way better than stripes.  (oooh! speaking of stripes, I could start on some World Cup scarves now that more teams have qualified!)

And there are some plain brown socks:

This yarn was some kind of ugly in the skein, but it knitted up very well, and it's soft, too.

And there are a lot more socks as well.  These are the ones I didn't have to dig out of a drawer to photograph:

Those are some Ilga socks destined for The Man, the September sock club socks, and some purple jobbies from the leftover purple yarn for the Kimono shawl.

Speaking of which, this would be an excellent time to show you the kimono shawl:

Nope!  That is The Man sporting his lovely new Flit and Float scarf in lovely lilac Zephyr with the butterflies and the ruffled edge.  (Also, he is wearing the grey sweater I knitted for him two years ago.)


OK, here it is:

Oh yeah.  This might be the best thing I have ever done.  Or it might be the second-best thing after the crimson cardigan.  I can't decide.  I love them both.

Check it out:

Didn't I do a great job?  I am so proud of this and I love the color too.  The color, by the way, is Mel's fault, because she made a Baby Surprise Jacket for The Bean from this yarn.  I loved the color so much that I greedily snapped some up for myself.  I am not going to give this one away.  This one's a keeper.

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.

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?

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.

The Dining Room Table is a Disaster

It is. By now, you all know how oddly compulsive Dirtbunny is. I can't clear off the table to get to the good stuff until I put the finished stuff (and the stuff I'm not going to work on imminently) away. And I can't put it away until I write about it to my loyal four readers (plus occasional other non-loyal readers). And there's no sense in taking photos of what's there until I deal with the old photos that I haven't shown you yet. So, catching up:





That is a pair of completed January sock club socks (complete with bead work!) and one half-done Icehouse sock in the ubiquitous Jaywalker pattern. I did not want to mess with the beads, so it took a while to get started. Then there's the tedious stringing of hundreds of beads on the yarn before you can even start knitting. I will not be doing lots and lots of beadwork in the future, but these turned out to be a fun and beautiful project, so yay for me. Icehouse started out fun, but is fun no more. I may not finish them for a while.

And this may look familiar, because it is a larger version of the purple lace scarf I made last summer. I'm better at lace now, so this one is turning out better. It's an easy knit, but it is not a no-look knit, which means it requires more concentration than it deserves, so it isn't getting much attention. The idea was to make a wrap out of leftover yarn, and just keep going until the yarn is gone, since the pattern lends itself to that, but there is A LOT of leftover yarn.

LOTS of leftover yarn + concentration + boring = probably not going to finish this year.

Oh well.

The Potholder

It is done. When I mentioned that I had achieved a major knitting milestone but wasn't going to discuss it until The Man noticed, The Man started marching around the house looking for whatever it was that he hadn't noticed. Then he unearthed the potholder (then unblocked) and held it up in a lump and said, WOW!







Now I ask you, does that blue lump look WOW-worthy? It does not. But if you block it, it becomes WOW-worthy.



I think we've been through the blocking process before, but let's review.

First, ya get it good n wet:






Then, ya stretch it out and pin it in place.





That sounds easy, but it can be tricky. You want a symmetrical piece to turn out symmetrically, so it helps to measure things, a lot, which I failed to do, and because of which the potholder is not quite symmetrical. Oh well.



Also, if you have a needy beagle, the pinning process is complicated by him being a big baby and getting underfoot.




He is sulking, because he doesn't believe that I could possibly be involved in any situation that would not benefit from Kirbyhelp.

When it is dry, ya need to find something to drape it over so you can take a nice photo. I chose this:







Isn't it pretty?

This one is a little out of focus, but I think it came out nice.

The Man had just come in from cutting the grass, so now the potholder smells like stinky sweaty The Man head. I wish I had thought of that first.