AnotherPurl :: a knitter's life

finding time

We've been having friends over a lot more frequently in our new place, which is a lot of fun.  We're playing games, even ones I enjoy, and ordering out and generally using our friends as guinea pigs for things we want to try (umm, see ordering out).  Someday our games played will not be quite so much Apples to Apples and Uno.  We've been playing a lot of Uno.

Of course this week has been kind of crazy in that super busy way with my lovely husband getting to work before 8 a.m.  While people are getting together at our place, I believe we're also trying for around or just after 7 p.m.  Neither of us is getting home early today (I'm stopping by the grocery store for ice cream fixings).

I'm thinking of making a cherry cheesecake ice cream.  I have cream cheese.  I have cherries.  I have sugar and lemon and vanilla.  I just need to get another container of heavy cream or light cream in case what I have has aged beyond the using point.  Of course, while I want to make ice cream because it is hot, I also want to make these pies because they sound and look delicious!  Maybe when I go to the grocery store I'll get refrigerated pie crust, and make lazy pies to go with the ice cream.

Of course, in the if wishes were horses category, if I was smart I would have already placed an order with Penzeys for cumin (which I am almost always out of) and for vanilla beans.  I wonder if I can go back in time and order the spices last week so I'll have them in the kitchen now.

scudding clouds and a wooly knit

This week I've been pretty easily distracted by life and work and the knitting has fallen by the wayside.  Mostly this is because instead of knitting I've been reading a few books, but even when I'm commuting I'd play a video game if I wasn't reading. 

I blame the blanket, but it's not the blanket's fault.  I have four projects going on: the baby set, a vest, a lacy top, and a pair of socks.  The pair of socks are mostly being ignored (they're my at home project) in favor of the baby set, which I want to finish soon (I was going to say this month, but heh.  Not going to happen).  The lacy top is my lunch time project.  Well, I skipped it for a book one day and today I worked on my commuting project instead.  Happy wool in an air conditioned building and staring at the summer sky.  Sounds good to me.

Unrelated to knitting, I've been doing Wii Fit off and on for over a month.  For the last couple of weeks that mostly means just doing the Body Test and watching it tell me I've gained or lost the same 3-4 pounds.  Obviously I'm not trying very hard.

I really should put the game back into the system and not just use the quick version (which is just the test).  Though I was trying to do a variety of exercises, I mostly was using it for the Free Step and the Penguin game and a few other things. 

(I was going to put in one of our recent kitty pictures, but really this one is just too funny not to share!)

Hopefully my upcoming weekend will be relaxing.  I'll probably work on the sock for a bit, because it is the easiest project on the needles right now and I could use a dose of easy.

weekends in Quincy

I'm not sure why there is a giraffe statue in Quincy, but I walk by him on a fairly regular basis.  He's kind of freaky looking, all steam punk and smoldering eyes (really glad that I didn't get a front shot, where he is staring at you).

The worst is walking by him at night, which thankfully I don't do very often. 

This weekend was full of oddities.

Saturday I did my long run by running to meet my running buddy in Quincy Center.  I wasn't able to finish our running distance, though I got more than the 8 miles logged because I started running from home.  Hrm.  Not the way I intended to get my running in.

Sunday I had game.  I am a geek and I play Changeling with a few of my friends on occasional Sundays.  I had a lot of fun despite the friendly fire from one of the other players (done on purpose, so more like very unfriendly fire).  I was exhausted when I got home, so I didn't finish my 2 hours on the baby set. 

Urgh.  The baby set.  I worked on it Saturday, weaving in ends after ends.  The blanket by the instructions was done in strips, and it takes me about 30 minutes to weave in the ends on a single one.  I can only imagine how much more grumpy I would be if I had followed the pattern's initial instruction to just knit squares and sew them in.  Even more ends!  Yuck. 

Needless to say, I have a lot left on that project.  The laundry list goes something like this: weave in ends, crochet strips together, weave in more ends, sew jacket together, weave in more ends, sew baby hat together, weave in more ends, do embroidery on all three pieces and then, ahem, weave in more ends.

This project makes me feel like this:

Hopefully I will feel better about it with a few more days work on it.  You know, once the ends are woven in!

slip slip bake

I have on our washer machine what I affectionately call my alien.  It's a little XO (give one, get one) laptop.  However, we've never consistently managed to make the little wireless network connection work, so it sits on the machine and occasionally I try to use it to access a recipe online. 

I get most of my recipes these days from a half dozen food bloggers.  Unlike a site like Allrecipes, which has a variety of tasty, tasty foods, but usually substandard photos, most of the food bloggers have this glorious photography that makes eating and the initial preparations into an art form.

For over a week I've been debating the merits of turning on my oven, and usually avoiding it.  The temperatures have finally reached summer, and my body is taking its normal time to adjust.  Last night wasn't really any better, but I decided to cook.  In the morning I made pizza dough from my mother's recipe, and then I made these muffins before bed. 

The muffins are really good and would have benefited from either a light flouring of the sprayed pans or actual muffin liners.  The muffins are incredibly moist, and so a few of them refused to release cleanly from the pan. 

My pizza dough while tasty was horribly misused.  In my recollections of what to do and my haste, I did not double check the recipe and proceeded to use the entire batch of dough even though the recipe said to halve the dough before rolling out.  Whoops!  It was still surprisingly tasty (I didn't use a sauce: just leftover bean spread, bell peppers, feta and ricotta), but so much more bready than I am used to!

rip! reknit

I have this gorgeous skein of sock yarn from Woolcott (image snagged from the blog, saved to my server), but I apparently couldn't pick the right pattern for it.

I started off with a simple 60 stitch 2x2 rib, but then I decided I wanted a pattern.  Bad idea.  Apparently most of the sock patterns I liked would involve a special cast on, a different ribbing pattern, a completely different stitch count, or were for worsted weight or DK instead of sock yarn.  Well, I solved that by ripping out the 2x2 rib and recasting on for the Mock Cable Socks. 

I got halfway through the first repeat of the pattern and decided that I didn't like how it looked.  I'm pretty sure that I should have been doing my M1 as purl stitches, and so I had these odd ridges where briefly there was some garter stitch.  It's a very odd look over just one stitch in a sock.  Last night while watching Moulin Rouge (well, listening... that movie is like very odd crack or something... especially Like a Virgin) I ripped it all out again and went back to flipping through 25 Favorite Socks, of which I'm really interested in about 10.

I started over and am about halfway through the initial ribbing on the cuff for a pair of Retro Rib socks.  I feel like the last person in blogdom to have made a pair of these (almost: over 800 pairs on Ravelry).  The only way I could feel more like the last person ever is if I were making the Embossed Leaves.  That will happen as soon as I find an appropriate color/weight yarn in my stash certainly. 

This is, of course, a long winded way of saying that I managed to knit last night.  Not only did I manage to knit, I managed to knit on what I said I would knit on.  If I keep this up, I might actually finish another project this month!  [Or maybe not... there are only 9 days left to finish something!]

I have a p-l-a-n

I can see my husband shuddering now. 

I have 4 different projects going right now, and more than that if I take all of the UFOs floating around the craft room.  They are Delphine, the Portland Tweed Vest, a pair of socks from Favorite Socks, and the ubiquitous baby set, which I obviously dislike or it would be done by now.

Now, the p-l-a-n.

Delphine will be what I work on during my lunch breaks.  I love knitting, crocheting or cross-stitching over lunch.  It calms me down a bit for the rest of the day and the time I spend crafting is time I am not spending eating.  A valuable point given that I now live close to Donut King.

The Portland Tweed Vest is my commute project for those days when I don't feel like reading on the train.  Yesterday I worked on the ribbing for the back on the train and as I walked down Centre Street.  I'm sure people thought I was crazy.

The socks are a home project, mostly because I am trying to not have multiple knitting projects in my backpack at the same time.  Multiple projects don't stop me from working on just the one project, and in the meantime I have yarn getting dirty, needles poking out of bags and the bags themselves developing holes.  Might as well just have the one project.

The baby set.  This is mostly for my husband's benefit.  This is my Saturday and Sunday project.  I have to work an hour on this project each of those days before I can work on any of my other projects.  Hear that?  Please help me stick to it.  What is left for this project is: weaving in ends, sewing up for the hat and the sweater, purchasing and sewing on buttons, crocheting blanket strips together and some embroidery on the edges of the hat, sweater collar and blanket.  Even if I just get a little bit of headway each day, I will be able to call it finished.  It's just an embarassment that this project has been in my Ravelry list so long.

After this, I'm going to add more weaving and cross-stitch back to the pile.  I have a queue of started projects large enough to keep me going for years in pretty much every craft category without a need to buy a large amount of supplies, and cross-stitch was my first craft so I have even more of it than even the knitting stuff.  It would be nice to finish a second piece this year... as soon as Delphine is done.

running through the blanket

Today my friend and I went on our long run starting from Harvard Square.  It was a pretty good run - on target for my half marathon pace - though wet.  The air was so full of humidity that even my short jog to the MBTA left me dripping sweat. 

Most of our run was along the Charles River, which theoretically cooled us off a bit.  On our way back to Harvard Square along the Boston bank of the Charles, I am pretty sure I saw a cormorant.  Of course, I don't run with my camera (and it now occurs to me that I did have my phone.  doh.), so here is an image from Lonetown Woods (the author takes a lot of beautiful bird photography, so if you want to see more hawks and sea birds and even vultures, please go look).

Next week's long run is supposed to be 8 miles, and will hopefully not be quite so muggy.  I also hope that it isn't in Harvard Square, because the Square is full of temptation.  There is Beadworks (though I normally go to Lush Beads), and Lush, and ice cream and coffee.  There is also Woolcott.  Sean, the owner of Woolcott, has started offering his own hand dyed yarn, which I first saw on Queer Joe's blog a few weeks ago.  The colors that Joe bought were super saturated jewel tones, which I love (love, love).  Each of the colors however are once offs.  Sean only makes a few skeins of each color.

Those were gone, but there were still some really pretty colors.  I bought a skein (and they wound it for me at the shop, so I could start right away) of Melon Cooler and some size 0 needles to make sure that they fit my feet.

No pictures of the Melon Cooler, but picture a bright spring green with golden streaks and little dots of red.  It is a beautfiul color, and I'll have pictures in the next couple of days. 

Now it is time to finish getting ready.  I want to visit my fishies at the Aquarium and watch the new Star Trek movie (again). 

I know what I did last night

Ummm, well, duh.

Last night two events merged allowing me a little happy experience after work.  Thursdays are Windsor Button's late night (open until 7 p.m., woohoo!), and it also happened to be my payday.  I had finished the stitching on my cross-stitch and felt like I could go and get some Soak and look around.

As if I would actually stop and just look?

I picked up Classic Elite booklet 9092 (Autumn 2008), which has the pattern for the Portland Tweed Vest, and a skein of Dream in Color Smooshy for a fine gauge Red Scarf project [scarf... there has to be a better way of writing this without repeating the word scarf over and over and over again.  scarf.].  I didn't get around to starting the vest last night, but I packed a couple of skeins of yarn with me in the morning and sat around drinking coffee and swatching. 

I think the world is coming to an end.  I don't normally swatch for anything!  But I'm hoping this time around that I will get instead of the 19 stitch/4 inches a gauge that is either a tad tighter and make the 38 inch size or a tad looser and make the 35 inch size.  I don't really care which way it goes as long as my row gauge is reasonably on target for once, because this is a small top and I am pretty much smack between the two sizes.  So, I have a double size swatch, which will hopefully prove one way or the other what size I need to knit. 

I've given myself 1.5 months to do this, which for me is a short amount of time.  I tend to flake out and set things aside, so I'm hoping the deadline will help me stay on target!  Now if I had just done that with the stripy socks with the afterthought heels.  I've been at the toe of the first sock for eons!  Maybe with 1.5 months for that project it would get done too!

*twitch* Just call me McTwitchy

Today's big ol' complaint: My leg has been twitching on and off for the last hour.  Such a darn distraction, though at least fairly benign.

I woke up fairly early this morning.  Ah, who am I kidding.  I woke up just before 3 a.m. and couldn't fall back asleep, so I was 'productive' and read more of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  I continued to be productive and instead of going to the gym this morning, I sat in the cafeteria and finished the book and finished my cross-stitch.  It needs some blocking just like a piece of knitting.

Better yet, I had a knitting project in my desk, so I was able to do some knitting over my lunch break (and while I made a mistake at the end, it is a relatively easy fix and I caught it before I had knit a second row).  That means I am back to working on Delphine, which I hope working on will call forth the rest of summer.  It's nice having a dedicated lunch project, so I will have to think of a different project to work on for my commute.  Probably finishing up one of the bazillion pairs of socks (4 is a bazillion, right?).

Windsor Button is open late on Thursdays, so I will go over there and get some Soak.  I would rather buy a small thing of Soak and wash some hand knits while I am blocking my cross-stitch, then go somewhere and buy Ivory Dish Detergent, which was my cross-stitch washing soap of choice (along with J&J baby shampoo).   It's been so long since I've washed and blocked a finished cross-stitch project that I'm not sure what the best method is.  The solution for this ignorance!

To the Internet! 

a new log

Monday I picked up a new workout logbook.  I had just finished week 24 in the Ultimate Workout Log by Suzanne Schlosberg.  Usually I just use the same workout log, but I was tired of the same tips and tricks, quizzes and other flavor.  I was also getting tired of buying at least 2 of these a year.  So, my new workout log is The Runner's Training Diary by Bob and Shelly Glover.  This training log is much more bare bones.  Each week is broken over 2 pages and has little boxes for mileage, shoes, heart rate and other things that are important for runners (and should be important for many avid exercisers).  There is a big box for each days running, which I am using to record pretty much any exercise I do.

So far it is pretty good.  I put my walking at the bottom of each big box with my other non-running exercises in the middle.  My running goes near the top.  I'm not sure that this will truly make me a better runner, but I'm hoping that I can get past what for me is a major hurdle.  My training cycle is usually about 4 months steady followed by 1-2 months of almost nothing.  The last almost nothing was right before my last half marathon.  Not exactly a stunning training plan.  My next half marathon is in about 10-11 weeks, and I would like to stay on target this time.  I don't mind including walking in the plan, but I need to feel solid at a 10 mile run. 

Running isn't the only thing I'm doing, but it is one of things I've been thinking most about.  I've been doing very little at home, but I finally managed to get a library card.  I've been flipping through Victorian Lace Today and Hands On Rigid Heddle Weaving.  I'm hoping to finish a project this week, so I can start something new (maybe from these books or more likely the vest pattern I've been eyeing).  Two months is a long time for project monogamy.