Give me back my nap

It is a Federal holiday, a day of remembrance and, for the cynical, a day of rest.  I'm supposed to have contractors here, but I don't.  The one doing outside work can't work because it's raining, and the one who needs to do some inside work just didn't bother to show, which means that numbers three and four may not be able to adhere to the schedule we have, and this project may never be bleeping finished.

Fine.  No work is to be accomplished today.  I'm tired, so I'll take a nap.  Only I can't because DingDong! someone shows up with a delivery for number two that I didn't know we were expecting.  (I'm rather pleased about the delivery, actually.  I was concerned they'd forgotten about that bit but the delivery means that they haven't forgotten, they just haven't been telling me everything.)   So good and I settle back down and then DingDong! contractor number five shows up to do some poking around and measuring.  He was not expected today.  My nap is blown.  Fuck it.  The only thing that can help me now is a trip to the yarn store, even though writing checks to contractors one, two, three, four, five, and six (oh yes, there is a number six) has left Mr. Bank Balance a little low.

But isn't this supposed to be the place where we discuss the knitting?  Fine.  Here is some knitting:

These are the Ilga socks.  Named for a woman but claimed by The Man.

How bout that fair isle, hmmm?  And the braid!  Do you see the braid?  I am awesome.

And then there are these:

The September socks.  All done as of last night.  They aren't for me either.  I'm working on a shawl and a scarf that are for me.  The shawl is black, which means it photographs like ass, and the scarf is lace and I fucked it up so bad I decided to rip it out and start over, which means it technically is not on the needles at this particular moment, but it will be once I put some time in on some secret deadline knitting and once I buy new short straight 4's to replace the now-broken replacement size 4 straight shorts that I got when I broke my short size 4 straights.  Or maybe I'll get a size 4 circular with lace points instead.  

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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.

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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.

Does Dirtbunny still Knit?

She does. She most definitely does. She's just been a little obsessed lately.


A few weeks ago, Dirtbunny had a birthday. Her birthday present was to go on a yarn crawl and buy yarn to make a spring sweater. She had picked out her yarn in advance (Rowan Calmer), she had a color in mind (blue) and she even had a gauge swatch done, yardage calculated, the whole shebang. And so on the appointed day, she went to the LYS--the one that offers the big birthday discount. Now it turns out that the big birthday discount applies only to in-store purchases, not to orders. And it turns out that the LYS did not have enough of the yarn in stock. We're not talking about not enough yarn for a Bunny-sized sweater, but not enough yarn for a normal-sized sweater either. In any of the colors. There would be no big birthday discount.


OK. So we'll order. Ask yourself: How well do you know your Dirtbunny? Think that over for a moment and then read on.


Can Bunny order the yarn she wants?

No

Even at full price?

No

Why not?

BECAUSE THE COLOR SHE WANTS IS DISCONTINUED.

Of course.


See? See? It isn't just me, is it? I'm cursed, right?


Sigh. Well and just Fuck it, thinks Dirtbunny. If I can't have what I want, then I'll just get a comparable yarn from what's in stock. And so she does. But not in blue, because blue yarn is apparently not being made this year. In pink. Yup. Pink is good, pink is fine, I wear pink all the damn time. And I bought a few other small things too. And I stacked it all up in the yarn chest because we will not be starting the spring sweater until the crimson sweater is done.


Fast forward two weeks. That goddamn pink yarn is burning a hole in Dirtbunny's head. It's nice. It's great. BUT it isn't what I really wanted. Bunny wants what Bunny wants. So we return to the LYS to order the yarn she wants, but not in blue, in yellow, so Bunny can replace the ragged yellow sweater she wears around the house.


And so she goes to the LYS. She needs 19 1/4 balls, which means she needs 20. They have 19 in stock.


See? I'm cursed, right?

Dirtbunny buys the 19 balls of yellow yarn. It has been a long long long time since Bunny ended up short and she gambles that it will all work out in the end. She is most certainly not obsessing over the extra one ball. It's not going to be a problem. She hardly ever even thinks about it. No big deal. So what? Lalalalalalalalala


And that is why Dirtbunny's yarn inventory has gone way way up.


But there is some good news. First, Bunny finished the brown beagle wubbie, which means that the last of the crappy brown acrylic from 15 years ago is finally gone.




Isn't it gorgeous? (not) But it's perfect for The Boys, and it closes the circle on a very important nagging pebble in Bunny's size 11AA shoes.


Also, we have socks:




The navy blue ones in the center are the Earl Grey socks. I am doing them on size zero DPNs because the pattern wants 72 stitches, and I normally do 60 or 64 so I need them to be smaller. The combination of dark dark yarn and teeny tiny stitches means it is impossible for me to see what I'm doing unless I knit with glasses off, right up in my face, and under a bright desk lamp. (Bifocals? Who said anything about bifocals? Shut the fuck up. How old do you think I am?) I offer no predictions on when, if ever, these are going to be done.

The peachypinky ones on the left are the July prime sock club socks. They're easy and kind of uninspiring, so I'm not spending a lot of time on them.


The greenyyellowbluepinky ones in the middle and on the far right are The Man's Self-Selected Don't Blame Bunny socks. Based on feedback from a recent poll, Dirtbunny let The Man into her sock yarn stash and permitted him to choose his own yarn for his next pair of socks. This is what he chose. I think they are very, very pretty. I'm a little surprised that The Man chose something so pretty, but hey, what do I care really?


And there is the Bianconeri scarf. The less said about the Bianconeri, the better. I knit on this while I'm watching them, but it's not helping them win.







I should probably give you a link to explain what the Bianconeri are, but they are playing a game live right now in Catania, and if I link them, I'll probably get a spoiler on the current score, and I'm saving the game for later. So

BIANCONERI = THE OLD LADY = JUVENTUS

Bunny's favorite futbol team. Although you could have googled it if you cared. Moving right along.




Now HERE is where I spend most of my knitting time:

[Please to notice one Yarn Bandit keeping an eye on me because I'm in the kitchen after all and you never know when I might give him a treat. Also, Kirby's dogbutt.]

Anyway. hmmmm.

Crimson sweater. Lovelovelovelove. &hearts&hearts&hearts Two sleeves and the back are done, half of one of the fronts is done, and I'm not bored yet. I have, however, poked a hole in the side of my thumb pushing on the tips of my addi Turbos , but I just tape it up and keep going. Cabley goodness. Yum.

The sock club

I finished the March sock club socks a few minutes ago. The first one had its good moments and its bad ones, but the second one went much better because I knew, without measuring, that I needed five repeats on the leg and five repeats on the foot and I knew how to handle the migrating stitch markers during the heel gusset. Plus: green. So goodbye, march sock!







The July sock club sock arrived this week, so it isn't at all too early to be done with March. Here, by the way, is my famous cookie box full of leftover sock yarn destined to become mini-socks:

There's some good stuff in there, but the oldest is the Lorna's Laces in "camouflage" so I suppose we all know that means Bunny "has to" do the camo minis next.

By the way, I seem to have lost my badly bent size 1 metal KnitPicks DPN. It was so bent that I banished it, and yet now that I don't remember where I banished it to, I feel a sense of loss.

Yes, it's true. I go to therapy every week, and I take my meds faithfully. I'm still bonkers.

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.

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.

Gaaaaah! Gaaaah!

This house is an embarrassing crap hole of yarn piles, knitting book piles, and assorting yarn-related detritus strewn about in a stress-inducing anxiety-making way. Every flat surface in this house is covered either in yarn or dog hair (it's warming up and they are shedding). The Old Folks are coming tomorrow and there is no where to sit.

I have bathed Kirby and now I need a bit of a rest before I can start working on denuding the Yarn Bandit of his winter coat, so I started poking through the yarn mess to see where we are with what.

Here is the Ye Olde Yarne baby hat:

You will see that I ripped out the old version. The rolled edge didn't look right, so here we have a do-over with a ribbed cuff, and a little I-cord top knot. This is for Poppy. I hope it bears some relationship to the size of a small human head so that Poppy could actually wear it someday.

Here are the stripeys:

They are displayed to advantage on my new sock blockers. What, may you ask, is that in the background? That is someone's jacket---not mine---draped over the back of the same chair where it has lived for about three weeks now. I bet you one hundred billion dollars that someone--not me--hangs it up in the closet before the Old Folks get here tomorrow.

Yesterday, to my great delight, I received the May sock club sock. This yarn is uncommonly beautiful, but for now, it goes into the drawer where it will wait its turn.

It is time to start a new plain sock. I'm not sure what to do. I have another skein of stripey, and another skein in another color, and I would like them to be done. I also have a bunch of different self-patterning stuff I want to get to. I am most called to do a set of tiger socks, but starting those now would violate my rule prohibiting more than one Ye Olde Yarne project at once, because I had planned to start a pink hat for The Bean from some heavyweight socks that rock leftover from the twinkle toes. Can't do both.

I defer that decision until after I brush Tiki.

Bunny out.

When the going gets rough, the Bunny gets startitis

So these are the mini-socks that saved me from quitting knitting forever:

The next mini-socks are from leftover Lorna's Laces in "Daffodil":

I finished the red lace scarf except for the blocking.

It still looks like ass:

When my new blocking wires get here, we'll find out whether this was all just a big honking waste of time.

The purple lace scarf, also Lorna's Laces, is about half done.

And sock number two of the stripey socks is about 45 minutes away from being finished:

This leaves the teal sweater. Here we have the seven-foot lace and cable panel being unraveled and knit into a Bunny-sized lace panel:

Then you may remember what happened next. I am happy to report that Dirtbunny successfully got 250 evenly-spaced picked-up stitches from the 99 repeats without spilling any more beer on herself. And so here we are now:

I am unhappy to report that the next step is to knit 15 inches of plain stockinette stitch, increasing four stitches every 10 rows, to end up with a whopping 290 stitches. Of stockinette stitch. Fifteen fucking inches worth. Paying attention to the row count required because of the increases. I fear this is going to take a while. I may not be done in two weeks after all, not that that was ever really going to happen.

If I were monogamous, which I am not, I would probably die of boredom. I might die of boredom anyway. When knitting gets boring, one has two choices:

1. Finish it.
2. Start something else.

I am a polyamorous knitter, so I decided to have an orgy, I mean, I undertook to begin a pile of new projects.

This is a baby hat from Ye Olde Yarne, to wit, leftover from Tiki's red sweater, which you saw here:

Let's all pretend that I have enough yarn to finish without having to frog it all and try again in a smaller size.

Further (my boss loves that word), some new ribbed socks in a light blue merino:

I have decided not to take into account that I am a loose knitter, and I am going for the 64 stitches on size 2s as the pattern demanded, pretending that the fact that it is ribbed will mean that it will not be too big for the normal human foot, or that there is a large-footed man out there who would love a pair of light blue socks.

Is that all? No, of course not. I have retrieved the leftover yarn from the fair isle dog sweater, and am poised to cast-on a fair isle hat to match it. Books of patterns for dog outfits also tend to have a selection of human outfits designed to match because some dog people think it's just too cute to go out dressed the same as the dog. Not so much around here. The fact that I've knitted dog sweaters is as far as I am going to go in that direction. Nevertheless, I like the fair isle pattern, I have enough yarn left to make at least one hat, and maybe two, and no one has to know that it matches a dog sweater.

But wait!

There's more!

We are expecting two new knitters, Bean and Poppy, who are expected to be born in October, and surely there is something in the stash destined for them.

Calm down, Mom. They are not expected to be born from me.

Anyway, here is 80% of a sleeve for Poppy:

This will be followed by more baby stuff, as we have two yarn shopping trips planned, and I have some ideas about some other stuff I already have. And I have two skeins of stuff that I need to do something with because they've been around a while and I'm sick of them. And I need a plain sock to knit once I'm done with the stripeys. And if the lace looks good, I've got 1580 yards of mohair lace weight that I bought long before I realized that lace weight is different from other yarn. And it's time for the May sock club sock to arrive, which means it's time to start the March sock club sock. And I have a sweater's worth of red yarn for The Man's next sweater. And plenty more brown crap for another beagle blanket.

I think I've just typed myself up into a frenzy. I need to take some deep breaths, and maybe I should knit a few rows on the teal sweater to put me to sleep, I mean, to calm me down.