I give up...

...and least for now. I handed in my final paper yesterday (yay!!) and CO for the shawl last night.

<--This is what I got. It had ladders and I hated the way it turned out so I took a picture, proclaimed it my "practice" piece, and threw it in the trash. This morning, I cast on again and tried knitting with my two circs, with my dpns, with a combination of both, etc etc. It just wasn't working out.

After a bit of a temper tantrum, I went online and found a belly button cast on. It requires contrasting, thicker yarn so I hunted through my stash and found some orange yarn. It looks very Halloween-y, I know.

I could totally see how the belly button CO was going to keep my lace-weight yarn in check by not letting the 9 sts twist around in confusing ways. And it did work fine--until I got to the part where I had to start knitting my pattern. Ahem. At that point, having something to hold on to just wasn't enough. For some reason, 9 sts are kicking my butt. On the circs, I'm getting ladders from where the YOs meet the change in needles; on the dpns the knitting keeps twisting on me. I can't win the battle so I've put the project aside for a little while.

I consider myself a good knitter and should be able to knit this, damn it. I'll just let it sleep till it decides to behave itself. ;)

p.s. The progress pics I've seen are lovely so this won't be the last you hear of this project.

Upcoming knitting events

My class is over! Well, sort of. Tonight was the last meeting and our final paper is due on Friday. You know what this means, right? More time at home with my hubby and dog. More knitting time. More leisure reading time. *jumps up and down* To celebrate, I've:

1) Decided to attend a knitting event on Sunday, Sit 'n' Knit Bake Off. It's not a competition, just an excuse to eat homemade goodies while knitting in Central Park. I'm baking cherry crumb cake. :) This is my not-so-local local knitting group (Manhattan-based) and I have to miss a lot of their events so I'm excited to be signed up for this one.

2) Joined my local knitting guild. I've wanted to do this since I first started knitting, but my then-local guild met on a weekday afternoon (no good for working folks). After I moved about a year and a half ago, I didn't even look, assuming that most groups met during the day. Thanks to David of Sticks and String, I checked again and found my local guild on Ravelry (yay, Ravelry!). It turns out that they're meeting again on July 10th and *Lily Chin* will be there. The one event is worth the annual dues of $10, don't you think??

3) Bought more knitting stuff! Ahem, I probably should have held off on this but I couldn't resist. When I was searching for my guild I clicked on one of the Ravelry advertisements and it was all over. I bought some beautiful stitch markers from Etsy and will share photos of them when they arrive.

I say "more" knitting stuff because I just bought some the other day.

...and...

My beautiful Knit Picks purchases arrived yesterday: Victorian Lace Today, The Best of Interweave Knits, Needle Size ID Tags, 60" Needle Cables, 24" Needle Cables, two 24" #3 Circ Needles, 32" #3 Circ Needle, and 47" #3 Circ Needle. At least a few of these needle-things will be used for GK Mystery Shawl, which I will start over the weekend.

As the Yarn Harlot would say, it seems I've had a bit of a "falling down." Good thing I've been accumulating yarn money for just this purpose. ;)

more sheep

Between homework, I've been working on Little Lambs, the blanket for my college friends. I'm 5 or 10 rows past the third repeat of the sheep.

I stayed at their house a few weeks ago and though they don't have the baby's room decorated and its sex will stay a surprise, I think this blanket is right up their alley. It's nice when that happens. :)

Added later: A couple people asked where to find the pattern. It's in the VK Knitting on the Go book, Baby Blankets.

A lunchtime post

I have been wanting to cast on for my GK Mystery Shawl since the clue got posted on Saturday. I really don't have much of an excuse since I already had the yarn and knew the gauge I liked with it. I'm blaming my lack of needles.

You can CO with either dpns or two circs and I had myself convinced that I had two #3 circs. A while back, I bought sets (doubles) of fixed length needles in small sizes; I thought #3's were in with the bunch but of course I couldn't find the bunch right off the bat because they were "put away."

When I finally found them, it wasn't a them (only one circ) and Muir was using it. I wasn't about to take the needle from beautiful Muir so I decided to buy more needles. Since who ever has enough of those? ;> hehe. Anyway, yesterday at lunch I went on Knit Picks with the intention of buying some needles to use...and somehow ended up with enough stuff in my cart to get free shipping. Pics when it all arrives. (It all shipped out yesterday, too.)

Once my class ends next week, I plan to knit this project full speed ahead. Can't wait!

FO: Classy Slip Up Socks!

Pattern: "Classy Slip-Up Socks" by Betsy Lee McCarthy
Source: Knit Socks!: 15 cool patterns for toasty feet, page 104-111
Knitting Started: March 13, 2007
Knitting Finished: June 8, 2008
Size: Fingering weight version, as written
Yarn: Less than 2 skeins of Knit Picks Essential [75% Superwash Merino Wool, 25% Nylon; 231 yards/50 gram ball] in "Dusk" (color #23693)
Gauge: 8 sts/in in stockinette stitch
Needles: US #1 dpns

This pair of socks took me 15 months to complete even though I liked the way the first one came out.... The first one was finished in the Bahamas and the second one was knit mostly on the way to/from North Carolina and I'll definitely think of both of these places when I wear them.

The second sock is knit more skillfully, except for a line where I ripped back to a mistake and misjudged my place in the pattern. Oh well. I'll (hopefully) be the only one who sees it.

I'm so glad they're done and that they fit so nicely. I should be getting lots of use out of them. :)

Look at old posts here.

Malabrigo

Maude Louise...is coming along smashingly. The yarn is absolutely beautiful. It's stunning. Since it's hand-dyed, it's not really black (even though it's supposed to be) but I'm having such a nice time knitting with it and it's looking so pretty that I don't really mind. It will be a sort-of-brown/sort-of-black sweater for work. Not the end of the world...

Anyway, the sweater is knit from the bottom up. After a bit of ribbing, you change to stockinette until you hit the 7" mark. At that point you switch to the charted/design part of the cardigan (and then back again till the armhole shaping).

As you can tell from the picture, I've decided to do the whole body of the sweater sort of at the same time. I knit 7" of the back, took off the interchangeable needle tips, got a new cord, and started on the front of the cardigan. I’m knitting the right and left sides on the same needle and have about 5 or 6" so far. I'll go back to knit the back's design once I knit 7" of the fronts.

I actually knit a few rows on the bus ride to work today. I've knit in cars and on trains but it really wasn't the same. If it weren't such a short trip, I think I would have had to stop knitting because I was getting a bit nauseous.

I didn't knit on the way home because I was concerned with the color differences between the two fronts. What do you think? FYI, I don't think there are any shadows on the knitting in the pic above. Does it look bad? One of the fronts is obviously lighter than the other (and the back). In my office it looked horrible but in my back yard it was sort of ok. Any opinions??

I think I'm going to hold off knitting this for a while. I'll look at my other balls of yarn and see if I can't do the one front in a closer shade (it's all been easy knitting so far so it won't be the end of the world. I'd rather want to wear the FO than finish the project speedily.

p.s. Though from my last post it sounded like I wasn't doing any homework, I have been reading in the evenings and I’ve been thinking about my final paper...a lot.

Homework avoidance

Um, I joined a lace shawl KAL. Sunday night I finished a sock, this week I knit my cardigan at lunch, and now I've committed to making a lace shawl. Yeah. (Note: these moments of "free" time are supposed to be for homework.)

The "Goddess Knits Anniversary Mystery Shawl" is a Yahoo Groups KAL. It starts this Saturday (6/14) and I'll get one charted clue per week for five weeks. The finished product will be a laceweight, circular, pi-shaped shawl.*

Anyway, I plan on using the JaggerSpun Zephyr Wool-Silk 2/18 that I have in my stash. Back when I was knitting MS3, I bought a cone of it--about 5,040 yds--and I should still have enough left over to knit this KAL and about two more shawls. FYI, this is an amazing deal because I only paid $44! :)

*If you’re interested, you better head over to the Yahoo Group and sign up because the designer is closing registration on June 30.

Woohoo!

The socks are done!

Grad school is bad for knitting

For the past week, I've been carrying around a 1,696-page book that weighs 4.3 pounds and is about 3 inches thick. That makes my bag so heavy and bulky that I have no desire to add even socks to my daily bundle. (Even if I did, I wouldn't have time to knit them because I'm taking a "shortened" summer class, which means we meet four nights a week for a month. I'm reading during lunch, between work and class, and at night but can look forward to a class-free July and August...)

As my last post said, not attending grad classes really is great for knitting and I made the most of the two weeks between Spring and Summer classes. I knitted like a mad woman. If I didn't make a mistake, I'd have finished my Classy Slip Up Socks by last weekend. I got to the halfway point on Little Lambs. I casted on for Maude Louise and actually knit a few inches of the back. I gave up on knitting Dennis's Socks on two circs and switched one of them over to dpns and knitted merrily.

~Classy Slip Up Socks~

I really had visions of finishing up my socks by the end of last week but, last Friday night, I encountered a problem. I had gotten so in the hang of decreasing for the gusset that I forgot to stop! In my defense, I was following the hash marks I'd made for the first sock so paid less attention to the actual directions. I neglected to notice that though there were 16 hash marks, most of them were without decreases. Ahem.

See that part that's wound around the deflated center-pull ball? That's how much I ripped out. My guess is that it's about 6 repeats--24 rounds!! I'm proud to say that I didn't toss the project across the room; I tinked for a row or two before whipping out the needles and ripping out hours of work. I put the stitches back on the needles and started up again, this time without decreasing. Oh well.

I must confess that I carried these socks to and from my car each day with the hopes of working on them for a few minutes before class. No luck with that, but today I knitted them at lunch and have put them in my suitcase (maybe I'll be able to squeeze in a little knitting time in MD, if I'm not sweating to death in the 100 degree weather. ;)

~Little Lambs~
Enough said. :) Ok, maybe one more thing can be said about this project: I'm spending the weekend at the intended recipients' house. I can’t wait to see the expectant parents!

~Dennis's Socks~

A while ago I did something wacky with this project and I still have no idea what it was. Knitting the other socks wasn't as bad as I remembered so I decided to transfer Dennis's Socks to dpns so I would actually work on them instead of procrastinate about planning to figure out where I’d gone wrong. I've knit a few more rounds and will keep them handy for easy-knits when I need them. For now I’m still knitting the easy K2, P2 leg.


What with all the reading and writing I'm doing for my English class, I won't get to work on any of these projects very much. I vow to squeeze in some knitting time though! You can't just work, read, go to class, and sleep for a whole month.

OK, I'm off. Have a good weekend, everyone!