AnotherPurl :: a knitter's life

Do you remember Garbage Pail Kids?

Well, I was going to write something not witty and potentially obnoxious about the latest Vogue Knitting, which I got last night.  However, my email provided me something much more obnoxious to write about instead.  VK can just wait until tomorrow after all.

Garbage Pail Kids in Politics?

I remember Garbage Pail Kids fondly growing up.  They were sick little creations, and it was fun to see what I got in my latest pack.  Later this expanded to collecting other cards.  Nothing as worthwhile as baseball cards, but at one point (and I still might) I had a complete set of Sailor Moon cards.  Card collecting is not something I really do anymore, though I still have a lot of Magic: the Gathering, INWO, Mythos and other collectible card games.  They tend to be a little difficult to get rid of, and they are full of a strange bit of nostalgia.  Evenings playing cards, not bridge or pinochle, pretending to be crack investigators looking for the strange and tentacly throughout Arkham. 

Garbage Pail Kids were similar, though I didn't play games with them.  My brother and I would spread them out on the floor like a carpet.  I'm sure we were putting them in order (probably alphabetical, but it could have been anything), placing our treasures in rows upon rows.  Now, of course, I'd probably be mostly disgusted or amused at my younger self.  Maybe not.  I'd have to open a pack of them to find out.

'tis the season

I started a pair of socks for my MIL last week even though I hadn't finished the pair I'm working on (or the sweater... I'm on row 90something of 169).  Thankfully, I don't have any additional rehearsals this week, so I'll have more time to work on knitting (and cleaning, so much cleaning!).

I finally bought my first pattern from MochiMochiLand today!  I know so many people who would get a kick out of her patterns, but I figured that I wanted to get the materials together for a special project.  I have just under a month to make two of these little cuties up and mail them to their intended recipients.  Like most of what I've seen from MML, the pieces aren't huge so I think I have a shot at it around all of the socks, scarves and sweaters of my knitting days.

(I have to wonder if my in laws read the blog, so sometimes I'm deliberately vague.  They, much like my mother, have never commented, so I can pretend that they are unaware, but only at my peril.)

longer than I thought

Yesterday was more packed than I thought.  I met people for lunch, and decided to spend a bit of extra time at the gym because the condo was showing at 5, so I couldn't be around anyway.  A lot less knitting got done on the Vortex Street Pullover, though the cable pattern is starting to come through. 

This morning I'm going to donate blood and then come home and work on making butternut squash soup.  I have rehearsal (more blocking!), so in between everything I want to see if I can get the knitting finished on the sweater.  I'm about a third into the panel, so it isn't completely unreasonable. 

The instructions say to block the pieces before sewing in the cable panel, but I need to find a blocking option that is relatively quick (so I don't need to leave the sweater pieces on the floor for hours) or I need to ignore the instructions and sew it up without blocking first.

I'm using a yarn with acrylic for the project (ahem, it's from the stash, so while it would not have been my first choice, it is thrifty!), but I don't remember what I've done about blocking the acrylic blends before.  Maybe I can just spritz it with a bit of water and pin it out?  Any suggestions?

omg it's happening

Our condo is finally on the market!  We've been working like crazy people in the past few weeks to redo (refreshing mostly) all of the areas that showed the most wear and tear from our living here for the past four years, and it was finally spruced up and empty enough (mostly empty enough) to take pictures and get a listing up!  My knitting and our computer collection took up a lot of space, and it is great that things are put away or off in storage.

Though I hope we manage to sell sort of quickly so I can get some of the knitting (and kitchen appliances) that I packed and then nearly immediately realized I could use!

when a vacation is nothing like a vacation

Honestly, most of my vacations are like that.  They are full of weddings (and the stress that somehow manages to be a part of that even if you are doing nothing but getting there and attending), working at my favorite chocolate shop, or cleaning/errands that don't get run the rest of the time I'm working.

This has been mostly the same.  An out-of-state wedding, painting the bathroom, painting almost all of the white trim, cleaning (and more cleaning), attempting to wash the windows (and probably again later this weekend), rehearsal (including our first blocking rehearsal for Pour, oh pour, the pirate sherry) and even a little bit of knitting.

I'm still working on the Vortex Street Pullover.  I'm at the octopus stage, where I am knitting all of the pieces together for the yoke.  I have 2 skeins of yarn left (I just started one of the skeins last night), which should be more than enough for the cabled front piece, the rest of the yoke and the neck.  If I manage to find some time to actually knit this weekend, then I should be able to finish it before Rhinebeck (will it be too warm for this sweater?  No idea, so I'll probably have a tshirt to wear in the unlikely event I get too warm).

While I was traveling, I was working on a sock (picture will be forthcoming once I get around to pulling it out of the camera).  Actually, I worked on it twice, because I dropped a stitch with a yarnover and just couldn't seem to find all of the pieces.  It was quicker to just start over.  I am somewhere in the gusset for the first sock, but I don't want to work on it until I have finished the sweater!

I've been thinking about knitting a lot lately, and my stashalong rules.  I'm pretty sure that I should be changing them to a simple in-out arrangement.  I tend to buy my yarn piecemeal, so a free day hardly ever involves more than one or two skeins of yarn.  Since August I have knit up 6 skeins of yarn (only counted from finished projects): Picovoli, a pair of socks, and the Pi Shawl.  I want to have enough earned skeins to buy a sweater's worth of yarn later this month, but I still need to buy yarn for the in-law presents.  I'm hoping that finishing Vortex will be enough for that (the silliness of this kind of yarn math isn't lost on me, but I really do need to keep my stash at a constant while we're trying to keep the house uber neat!).