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.

Exciting Stuff

I thought I'd show you some of the stuff I recently finished, but the photos are crap and now the stuff is gone and can't be re-photoed.  So this is the best I can do.

2x2 ribbed scarf, in a melange of red Pam yarn and a dark grey yarn, plus a hat made from the leftovers.

Purple socks for my sister-in-law, from leftover Kimono shawl yarn, and already en route.

I've started a new shawl, but it's black, and there isn't enough pattern yet for it to be worth showing off.  I thought I had enough yarn to finish it, but now I'm not so sure, and that means going stash-diving to see if there's more.   Stash-diving is interesting, because I always find something I had forgotten about, and I usually end up distracted from the task at hand and going off in some unanticipated direction.  Since there is very little in my life that is not anticipated, that is a good thing.

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.

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 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?

Knitting Round-up

Lalala. So here's some stuff that's done or sortadone:



First, I have completed one of the March sock club socks. It is pictured here along with a mostly done Decimal cardi:


The Decimal cardi is now completely done. It lives in my office, where there is no good space for spreading it out for a full photo, but no matter:

And here's a detail:

Pretty? It isn't exactly what I pictured in my head, and I have to fuss with it to keep it on my shoulders when I'm walking around, but I like it.

By the way, this is my desk calendar from Uncle Sam, exhorting me not to be a bigot:

Because if I were inclined to be a bigot, a little message printed on my calendar would change my mind.

The Tatiana mittens are done. There are two pairs, one set of gloves with a cap that buttons over the fingers for when it's extra cold, and one set of fingerless mitts with cap:

They turned out kinda cute, but this pattern was not a keeper for reasons I've already mentioned.

And here are the Icehouse socks, finished a few weeks ago. They look better than I remembered. Good job Dirtbunny.

I have no photo of the plain blue Regia socks. They look like plain blue self-patterning socks. Use your imagination. I finished one this weekend. Because I have turned out some saggy socks in the past, I endeavored to make this one a little tighter. It was. The first one was so tight that my seven-year-old niece had trouble getting it on and off. I ripped it out and have started over on bigger needles. We'll see. If they suck, I'll never know, because The Man won't offer even constructive and useful and helpful criticism of the things I knit for him.

Aaaaaaand, I found an excellent pattern for a hat on Knitty.com, and I'm knitting a whole pile of Halfdome hats in leftover yarn. Hats are great because they are mindless monkey knitting (mostly, except for the occasional decreases) and because they are finished at about the same time I get sick of them. I have lotsandlots of leftover yarn that is going to become hats.

I have several sweaters planned in my head, but my next one is going to be a short-sleeved ribbed cardigan from Pam yarn. Pammie helped me get some work done today, and I want to do something beautiful with her beautiful Colinette ribbon yarn. We'll see how it turns out.

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.

Things I finished recently-ish

The wireless connection is fixed! Me so happy. I have a lot of catching up to do.

While I'm ogling that which I ogle, you may ogle--

November sock club socks:

Purple scarf thingy:

Yarn Bandit making use of felted dog bed:

Ding Dong the witch is dead

It's true. The itchy, crappy self-striping yarn is gone. I have made productive use of my captive-audience time and used up the last bits by knitting a pair of blue stripey child-size socks. No pictures (the camera is not in Indianapolis).


I am never buying that kind of yarn again. Yuck.


By the way, the hotel coffee here is not that bad, although The Man's coffee is still the world champion.

Curse of the Economy Plan

Remember the Economy Plan? To recap, this is how Dirtbunny avoids spending money so she can pay for the 1.8 billion dollar yard she bought a while back. In yarn terms, the Economy Plan means knitting from stash rather than acquiring new stash. Sometimes this doesn't work very well. This week, it has worked atrociously.


As you all know, this week, we started carting Kirby out beyond the beltway every day for his radiation treatments. This has been upsetting and stressful, especially on the day that the vet tech called me all freaked out because Kirby was not making eye contact and trembling so they decided to keep him longer. She understands now that not making eye contact and trembling is what Kirby does. That day sure did suck, though, and a LYS is on the way to the vet, so I stopped there to see if they had a little somethin purty to make Bunny feel better. And they did:

What you see here is the beginnings of a scarf/stole from the leftover purple yarn whence came the purple cardigan from days of yore. Leftover yarn makes Bunny anxious. Using leftover yarn makes Bunny feel thrifty. But this leftover yarn is bulky weight and very tweedy. There's probably enough for a scarf, an extremely boring scarf, but not enough for a stole. What in the hell complements tweedy purple bulky weight yarn? What indeed. Dirtbunny hit the motherlode with this one. The LYS proprietor was determined to help Bunny out and before she knew it, two skeins of discontinued eyelash yarn in a matching shade of purple were located and purchased. Tweed and fake fur, baby. I can hardly wait.

And here is the felted dog bed:

It turned out OK, I guess. The sides are not stiff enough to stay up, but they fold over nicely. It looks pretty cute, but it's a little shallower than I wanted. Tiki shuns it. Kirby has tried it out, but he is not convinced. And--oh no!--you can see that I did not use up all of the emerald-green Manos. Therefore, I was forced, forced I tell you, to do this:

Two more skeins of Manos in complementary colors so I can use up the last of the green Manos, plus three skeins of sock yarn, because that's just what happens when you go to the yarn store. It's not like I could have avoided it. (I also got a size 4 needle that I need for my pink sweater:

which has been swatched and will be started imminently, and a size 13 needle that I'm sure I had a purpose for at the time, but the reasons have now become obscure to me. I really don't fancy working with the big needles. What on earth did I get that for?)

Speaking of socks, here is the current batch:

There's the November sock club on the left.

The Man: That's nice.

Dirtbunny: Thanks. It's a sock club sock.

TM: Who's it for?

Dirtbunny: I dunno. [I really don't, but I do know that these colors are Not For Dirtbunny (tm)]

TM: [side-eyes the sock covetously, but says nothing]

Dirtbunny: Do you have something to ask me?

TM: Huh? [he heard me]

Dirtbunny: I said, do you have something you want to say?

TM: Whaddaya mean? [being weasely]

Dirtbunny: If you want these socks, you are going to have to ask for them.

TM: What? [I've known him for 20 years. I know what he's thinking. Just spit it out for the love of Mike. I don't feel like playing games.]

Dirtbunny: IF YOU WANT THE SOCKS, YOU HAVE TO SAY SO. [Was there yelling? I don't remember]

TM: OK! I WANT THE SOCKS! CAN I HAVE THEM? [He was definitely yelling. That I remember.]

Dirtbunny: Of course you can, sweetie.

--end scene

There are also yet more stripey socks, this time in a blue-based self-striping yarn. I hate this yarn, and I am on a mission from God to get rid of it. Plus, I need mindless commuting knitting for the next three weeks of the Vet Shuttle Service. And there's the newest set of minis.



What else?

Oh yeah. Lace.

Behold, the nearly-finished potholder:

I have ten more rows of pattern, then twelve rows of edging, then a bind off. Each rows takes me about 30 minutes at this point--we are approaching 400 stitches per row--and requires my complete attention. I am almost willing to concede that, in the future, this will not look like ass. But right now, it looks like ass. Plus, the pattern said I was going to need something like 1500 meters of laceweight, so I bought accordingly, and I am probably going to finish it at under 1000, so I am adding to my stash of leftover laceweight, and that can't lead to anything good.

Bianconeri play the worst team in Serie A today, which means it's a good time to choke. I accidentally saw a live score that had them in a draw with Chievo Verona, but that wasn't a final, so maybe something good happened in the end. We''ll see. Futbol and lace do not mix, so I think we're looking at futbol, Soave, a mini-sock, and then some tweedy purple bulky weight.

Thanks for joining Dirtbunny. See ya next time.

Did you enjoy "Curse of the Economy Plan"? Then check out our Special Feature, "Behind the Scenes at 'Curse of the Economy Plan'":

Step one: pile up all the crap

Step two: contemplate magnitude of pile and wonder "why?" "What, if anything, is the point of all this?"

Step three: confirm that beagle has not run off

Nope. He hasn't, and he looks unlikely to move from that spot without the proper food-based incentive.

Step four: sort through pile and take photos

Step five: relocate crap to....

Have you been paying attention? Where does Bunny pile up all her crap?

[theme from "Jeopardy"]

Did you say "the dining room table"? If you did, you are correct.