AnotherPurl :: a knitter's life

Ooops...

I haven't taken a picture of Scoop It, because face it: a partially completed back is just not that exciting.

I, in my dubious wisdom, decided that the back was going to be my swatch. I messed up the swatch a couple of times. The first time I thought I had made a mistake and ripped out only to find out that I was correct and was now doing it incorrectly.

Now I have a different conundrum. I am at the armhole shaping. I have done the first 4 rows or so of it even. My row gauge is off. Enough so that when I was supposed to work 5 rows even and have 12.5 inches, I worked another 8 rows to get the correct length.

There is this small part of me with a bit of devil may care that says to wing it. I have written out what I have done and I have only changed things in a non-shaped area. The yarn is nice, high quality yarn. If it is truly horrible I can always rip it out and start over again completely. Should I continue, or should I pull it out and begin the math?

A huge sigh of relief

I finished entering all of my blog archives today. I only have to fiddle with the side bars, put up my links (and make them look nicer), all of the buttons back, and I will be done with round 1. There are so many more things I can do with Movable Type, that I am pretty sure that the tweaking will continue until far in the future. I love the drop down menu for the categories, because I was getting sick of all of the categories and the placeholders showing up.

I haven't been knitting or stitching or anything much over the last few days. Today at lunch was the first time I had picked up Scoop It since Sunday. I love the feel of the Silky Wool in my hands. It is a soft yarn with slightly tweedy flecks where the dye isn't picked up as strongly. I will have to stop myself from petting the sweater when I get to that stage. I'm seeing myself in this thing at work, oblivious to the stares of my coworkers, petting my arm or belly. It's like knitting velvet (and a small part of me wants to see how it felts).

Year of the Dead Project

Somehow I have been roped into cleaning the condo, a small place that theoretically shouldn't need this much work to keep clean, but it does. Boxes have been opened, bags have been emptied, projects have been moved and move and moved. We are nearing the end (the remaining rooms are mostly paper mess that will be easier to clean even if it takes longer) and I have learned a few simple truths.

1. About two years ago I up and abandoned cross-stitch in favor of knitting. I had at least 6 projects in various stages of completion, from My Lady's Garden to Northern Animals and a few Welcome banners.
2. In the two years or so I have been knitting, I have about 6 uncompleted projects, ranging from the Alien Scarf and a pair of Womb dolls to a sweater and a vest that were complete except for seaming.
3. When I was cross-stitching, I used a rotation which tended to work well in making sure that I didn't discard old projects in favor of either new or deadline projects. Everything got done and I could still work on four or five projects at a time without remorse.

There is no reason why a rotation can't work for cross-stitch and knitting (or any number of hobbies). The theory is that you work a certain number of hours (the grid is marked for 10 hour intervals) on a piece and then shift to the next one on the list (or at least one on the list rather than a completely new one). Every time you finish something, you can add another project. In my case, every time I finish a knitting project I can add another knitting project. Every time I finish a stitching project, I can put in another stitching project. If I can't get 10 hours done on a project before moving to the next one, I at least know I spent an hour on it and will go back (over one is very tedious).

There is a lot of information on the rotation system for cross-stitch, but I couldn't find the document I used to mark my progress in past. I have made a new one, which can be found here.

Accepting a challenge

The Yarn Harlot has issued a challenge to knitters. For the Olympics (she is calling it the Knitter's Olympics, but truly this can go for anybody), she wants people to challenge themselves. Knit something new, something difficult for yourself, do something you have never done before. The dates are February 10th (2 p.m.) to February 26th (I think it was 10 p.m.).

I wanted to start a sweater, but not the sweater I am going to start probably tomorrow night or Saturday. No, that sweater I want to have done before that date so I can start something new with a slightly less guilty conscious. I want to make this. It's pretty. It has cables, and I want to make it with a finer gauge yarn (cause I can't leave well enough alone).

However, the husband wants me to finally make the Monkey backpack from the first Stitch and Bitch book. I bought the yarn for it at least two years ago and I haven't succumbed to the urge to use the yarn for something else. It has intarsia, which I am a bit afraid of, and otherwise isn't really a difficult looking knit. I could probably do it.

The crazy part of me wants to do both, which I am pretty sure I am not physically capable of doing, especially because I am trying to ressurect the dead projects of other crafts this year. Dead cross-stitch mostly (if people think they have a ton of knitting UFOs, picture that number of knitting ones and then double it for the additional cross-stitch ones). What will I decide? I have no bloody idea.

Moving entries

I am still trying to move my entries from bloger to MT. I have used the instructions in about three or four different instructions, text files from my index page (the 999 entries method) and from the archives. I have tried individually loading files. I have left carriage returns in and removed extra white space.

I would really rather not have to add each entry individually, but that may be the direction I will need to go in. If that is the case, it won't happen until February. The long weekend coming up is a library book raid, and I will be working about 12 hours on Saturday and a few extra on Sunday. Exciting.

Honey, can you comment here so I will know that things are working?

Scoop It

I am finally ready to really make a sweater. I mean, I have a NBAT waiting to be seamed, but I knit it in July. July was before I started losing the nearly 40 pounds I had gained since college. And well, I am pretty sure it doesn't fit. I will finish it and put it in the charity knitting pile knowing I made something for an adult size.

Scoop It was something a lot of people made a Circles last year. The pattern was great and it was really inspiring to see how different people made it. One of the other people there made it out of a great purple yarn (don't remember what yarn), and someone else I know made it out of hot pink Cotton Fleece with a rhinestone buckle. It was glitzy and very girly. The top has a lot of shape to it, and looks fun and relatively easy to knit - a step up from making another One Skein Wonder.

I bought the yarn. A vibrant red Silky Wool. A little tweedy with a lot of color. I am looking forward to starting, but it appears I need to buy the magazine again, because I can't find mine. In the meantime, I am finishing socks and any other project I can get my hands on. Maybe 2006 will be the year of finishing more than I start. Who knows.

Changing Services

My blog has exploded and it is all my fault. I got out my geek shoes earlier today, and I have reconfigured my blog using Moveable Type. By applying my brains, I can do it for free, and have my old entries and still do stuff and I get to use more of the functionality of the F2O site. I got it to pull the old entries and what not, but I haven't finished finalizing pretty much anything so the site will be raw for a few days. But I hope to get this cleaned up before I go knitting on Saturday at Circles.

Shopping for others

It is always nice to find others who share your love (read: obsession) with a particular hobby. Knitting, cross-stitch, monkeys, pirates, ninjas. These are all things to share with joy and a particular mania only experienced by the particularly rabid. When visiting one of the hubby's friends in PA, I had a moment when I wondered if we could have been the same person.

She liked to knit. I like to knit. She plays Scrabble. I play Scrabble. She likes yarn. I love yarn. She likes the color blue. I like the color blue. (Wait, she eats meat, so we aren't the same. Phew!) Together we went to the local JoAnns Fabrics and rummaged around in their yarn section. I just bought some random TLC harvest colored yarn, and she found some Fisherman's Wool. There really aren't a lot of good places for her to go and get yarn. She envies me in Boston and I told her she had to come and visit for a yarn crawl.

A short time in forever

It seems like forever since I last wrote something at all much less something of substance (or at least about knitting). The holidays were busy. The entire month of December was a blur of doing stuff. The play ate the first couple of weeks, leaving me in a mad dash to finish the holiday knits. The hubby's family was enthusiastic about the gifts (two knitted scarves and one lap blanket), but only one of them seemed inclined to use their gifts. Good enough. More knitting for me.

Apparently PA is so dull that knitting is a spectator sport. I was making Branching Out in Ritratto and they were kind of fascinated by the growing scarf. It was fun to make, sure. But fun to watch someone else make? Not for me.

I finished that when I was there. Not bad for one day of travel and a day and a half. That allowed me to start the next project I had brought with me. Socks. These are Sockatta yarn in a pink, yellow, orange stripe pattern that is a lot of fun to knit. These are fairly standard socks for me and I will probably keep them. Right now, I am not working on them because I am trying to decide what color yarn to use for the heels and toes (I have a placeholder for an afterthought heel). Maybe I will make hubby take pictures of the knitting with his new digital camera.