NonFinisher

I'm not going to finish my RavOlympics sweater.

I came home from knitting on Tuesday night and finally faced the sad truth - I was going to run out of white if I kept knitting. Because I will want to stripe in a new dyelot I decided to stop knitting right there, rather than see how far I could get. I know this was the right thing to do, but I'm still a little disappointed.

Here's the sweater on Wednesday morning after I gave up:



Of course, part of me wants to look on the bright side - I did get a good start on a sweater I've been meaning to make for 3 years, and I did learn two handed weaving, and I did knit 1,120 yards in 12 days. And tomorrow I shall become Payday Woman, and I shall order more Will 'O The Wisp, and after 5 to 10 days for processing, and 2 to 3 days to ship, I'll be back on track. And I'll finish.

Until then, I'm going to go clean the bathroom.

Argh

The sweater is still pinned to my bed, and it's still wet. I have two fans trained on it, and yet.

I want to sleep!!

Sunday Morning

Again, off to work.

Last night I finished the body of the sweater and this morning I started blocking it. Here it is pinned out on the bed drying.


I really want to finish!

Friday Morning

I'm on my way to work, but just wanted to load up this updated photo of my RavOlympics project:



I'm still on the body and starting to get worried about running out of the Will 'O The Wisp which is the white. I've got another skein even after I run out of this one, but the sleeves are almost entirely white.

You can see that I subbed some colors in recently. I went to add the Rosebud in last night and it's just too pale, so instead I've used Lightweight Love (held doubled) for the pink. I completely love it.

Early Morning Knitting

I had a touch of food poisoning on Sunday night and went to work yesterday morning feeling like death warmed over. I stuck it out through my meetings but finally came home around 3:00.

I made it for another 3 hours, but then went to sleep around 6:00. Jorah says that he tried to wake me up at 9 to eat some chicken soup he made and I said, "Sleeping, not eating" and didn't even open my eyes.

All of this means that I woke up this morning at about 6:30 wide awake and ready to go. Which means I've been knitting for several hours now, happy as a clam. It's been really great being able to say to myself, "I can only knit for another hour and a half before I have to get ready for work."

I'm working on, of course, my RavOlympics sweater:



I'm really enjoying it. I keep thinking it's too big and going back to check my measurements, but Mom said she wanted this size, so this size I shall make.

While I've been knitting I've been listening to '90's music (in my computer in a folder called 'contemporary' - SDER) and (oops!) cruising the Blue Moon Fiber Arts website. Can one of you please tell Tina to either (a) Stop introducing gorgeous new colorways OR (b) hire me as a resident test knitter?

The resident part is very important - I want to live in her warehouse.

Have you noticed that these last few posts have a crazy amount of parenthesis? What's with me?

Knitty, Not Bloggy

Spoiler Alert! One of the patterns from the January shipment of the Blue Moon Fiber Arts Notorious Sock Knitters' World Domination Tour is pictured at the end of this post, in the yarn that came in the January shipment! (It's awesome.) Don't scroll if you're not ready to see it!

I've been on a major quest to finish some things up before the RavOlympics start and last weekend I finished three projects in two days! (That's one of the benefits of having so many projects going on at one time.)

Let's take a look, shall we?

First, the Mini Mochi socks that captivated me over Christmas. I've really only been working on them during Open Knitting since I got back to Madtown.

I don't know how I feel about these. The yarn is beautiful, of course. They look like they're lit from the inside, even in person. It was such a pain to knit with though - extremely splitty, oddly thin in some places and just downright broken in others. They're being cannibalized to use as a model for the next class sock class I'm going to teach, as they are my Stock Socks pattern (slightly shorter ribbing because I was really frustrated by the splittiness in purling.)

The next was also a shop model - Ice Queen from Knitty.



It's made of delightful Kidsilk Haze and is beaded - my first time knitting with beads (I've knit with Tili Tomas Rock Star, but that's pre-beaded.) It was also my first time doing a provisional cast on, which I now crazy love. I've done patterns that require them before, but I usually just do my standard backwards loop and pick up, because it's almost as good. I did the real thing this time because when I knit for the shop I don't alter patterns, so that customers should get the same result. I'm really glad I did this project, I learned a lot. (I know the picture is terrible.)

Project Number Three is the Floyd Sweater from Vintage Baby Knits and it's totally gorgeous.


I have two pregnant cousins right now and when I was telling my mom about it she asked who the sweater was for . . . I said it's for me! I'm not giving it away - I love this sweater! It's not really a baby sweater anyway - it's probably going to fit a two year old! (I had a ton of extra yarn after I ordered my second skein, so I decided to knit to a bigger gauge for a bigger baby!)

Oh! An awesome knitting friend gave me TWO skeins of Three Irish Girls's Beckon Stretch Merino in Father Time! I think it's going to be a shawl!


And now, the first shipment of the Rockin' Sock Club! I LOVE the Cascadia pattern! (I love mountains and dragons, so it's a complete homerun!) I'm actually way farther than this picture shows, this was taken last weekend!


And now, back downstairs to work on the RavOlympics project! It's awesome - photos soon!

(Happy Valentine's everyone!! Allow me to direct you to some socks I'll be knitting after the RavOlympics - My Vampire Boyfriend. I'm not watching the Olympics, by the way, but Buffy - soon Angel.)

Done and Done!

I officially crossed two things off of the list in the last two days.

On Sunday after I got home from work Jorah and I walked over to Tenney Park to go ice skating. I couldn't get my laces all of the way up and I was very unsteady in my skates so I created a common-sense caveat to my Last Year's Resolutions. I will do those things as long as I can do them without really hurting myself. I was unconvinced that I could skate with laces only halfway done, so I put my shoes back on and slid around on the ice in my shoes. It was actually super fun.

Yesterday morning the sign-ups for Schoolhouse Press Knitting Camp went live. I've been wanting to go ever since I found out that it existed years ago, and so this year I applied. I have my fingers crossed - I really hope I can get in. A couple of friends who have been before wrote me letters of recommendation (super nice of them) and so I'm hoping that will help me.

As far as the rest of the list goes, I'm working on it. I'm trying to get a knitting group going (I've been trying for about two months now) but people aren't coming regularly yet, so I'm not going to cross that off. I'm working on updating the blog and going to the gym, but it's hard with the short days and my work schedule right now. I'm thinking I might have to start getting up and going to the gym before work, even though getting up that early is against my prime directive.

I have a couple of things I'm working on, designy-wise I just need to get them written up. I also need to finish knitting my Floyd baby sweater, which is super cute but taking up all of my time. I honestly expect to be finished by Friday.

I went through the house and Goodwilled a bunch of things at the beginning of winter, so that's going well, I added about 95% of my music to the Ipod, and I've read a number of new books since August - they're all light and fluffy, but I'm okay with that.

So yeah. I think the Last Year's Resolutions are going well so far.