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.

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.

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.

Not a good day, again (sigh)

So it's a work at home day and I'm all jazzed because I think I've finished something and then it occurs to me, Gee, Bunny, the judge mentions all this stuff that wasn't on the tape and so I dig through the file and discover that THERE ARE SIX MORE TAPES and I am nowhere near finished. Also, it is cold and there are no cookies to go with my latte and Juve is late in posting the call sheet for tomorrow and no one seems to think that ADP will be called up to the Azzurri for next week's world cup qualifier against Montenegro.

Yesterday also had its problems. I had to do some travel stuff I DID NOT WANT TO DO and I got all worked up about it for no good reason. But I finished it, and then I cheered myself up by buying new glasses (more later when they are ready) and a new rug. However, in the process of melting my credit card on these enjoyable pursuits, I tromped all around the Golden Triangle in the WRONG SHOES and my poor Bunny toes are still suffering.

But Ima knittin'. So it's all good. (See how hip I am?)

Two weeks ago, I finished the crimson sweater. I have had a devil of a time getting a decent photo of it, so I haven't bothered to share, although I've worn the sweater a bunch already. At work, they are all probably already thinking "There goes that crazy bitch Dirtbunny in her red sweater again." I don't care. I love it.

So here's the best photo of me in the sweater:

The Man took this. I asked him to take my picture and he did. He didn't understand that the point was to show off the sweater and not the Dirtbunny. No need to notice the liquor bottles on the counter with the onions. (The creme de cassis has been deemed potable and so I'm poting it.) And, hey, I guess the white stripe on Kirby's e-collar is reflective.

Here's the best picture I have of the actual sweater:

My hair looks pretty good! And I'm sure if you disregard the glare from the flash, you can see the lovely cables. Bonus points if you can see the surprise guest over to my right.

That's right. Kirby. His motto: Whither thou goest, I will go. What a good boy. His birthday is coming up, so I hope you got him something nice that won't make him itchy.

My biggest accomplishment of the week is that I finished the September sock club socks, without running out of yarn. It was touch and go. I finished with about three inches to spare. Three inches, and that is all. Whew! Here they are sharing the sunshine with our little urinary monster and a pair of minis made from the leftover July yarn.

I'm pretty sure that my next big project is the Decimal cardigan from the current issue of Knitty. I already have a sweater's worth of pink cotton blend in DK weight that I bought for my birthday when there was no blue to be had and I've already knit and washed my gauge swatch.

I have ten repeats to go on the Flower Basket shawl--I mean potholder. I told The Man I was making a Flower Basket shawl and his brain managed to process that as "Dirtbunny is knitting a potholder" so now I call it the "potholder." You would not believe how smart and competent he is in the non-knitting aspects of life but "potholder" geez. I despair. Oh: the last repeat on the potholder took me about 2 hours to do, and it gets 20 stitches wider with every repeat, and it requires concentration so no TV knitting and no social time knitting unless I want to rip it back and weep a lot, so this is going to take a while. It's bigger than the last time you saw it, which means

~all together now~

IT LOOKS LIKE [MORE] ASS!

The March sock club sock is due any time. Wait! There goes the postman. Please hold while I go check.

[cue the girl from ipanema]

[Your call is important to us. Please continue to hold.]

[more the girl from ipanema]

Nope. Not today. Still, there is no chance I will finish November and January before March gets here. November is wound and ready to go, however.

Aaaaaannnnnnnnddd, it's been more than two weeks since I've been to the vet which must mean it's time to go to the vet, because they were so busy looking at Kirby's itchy feet that they forgot his biennial bordatella vaccination so I get to make another trip! Hooray! Kirby looooooves the vet. Off we go.

Killing time

The Man is not home from work yet, so I can't watch any of my Champions League recordings. Plus, I went to the eye doctor after work and got my eyes dilated, so I can't read. If I jack up the magnification on my laptop, take off my glasses, and lean in reeeeeeeel close, I can see well enough to blog. So here is what we have on the needles:




This would be the September sock club sock. These colors are Not for Dirtbunny, so I'm giving them to the Old Man when they are finished. The first one turned out all jacked up--cuff too short, foot too long--so the plan is to get the second sock right, then rip back the first one and knit it to match.





This is the Flower Basket shawl in lovely merino lace weight from Blue Moon Fiber Arts. It is lace and therefore it


(all together now)

LOOKS LIKE ASS!

But it is coming along nicely and will block out beautifully, I'm sure. I'm on repeat number six, and there are a total of seventeen, and it grows by 20 stitches per repeat so that's, that's ummmm a buttload more to go.

[Spellcheck thinks "buttload" should be two words, but clearly it is only one word.]





That should look familiar, because it is exactly like the grey stripey sock I did last summer because that's what you get when you have a leftover yarn compulsion-slash-fetish and you bought too much yarn. And next to it is a minisock from leftover July yarn.

And this, my friends, is the felted dog bed, which is not yet felted. The pattern calls for bulky weight and a finished diameter of 17 inches, but I'm using worsted weight Manos in green and scraps and I want a finished diameter of about, gee I don't know, beagle-sized or so. And of course it has to be bigger than that so there's room for it to shrink when I felt it. And then I'm going to edge it with the blue and green eyelashey stuff.

OK, I really don't know what the fuck I'm doing with the dog bed. But it's a DOG BED. Who cares if I fuck it up?

Guess what? I don't know how to felt either. Well, there was that one time, but it was an accident so it doesn't count.