Gloves and other thoughts

In for a penny, I suppose?
I'm almost done with this Cat in the Hat scarf.  It's a very easy, takes one skein, potentially funky or elegant accessory and a great first stab at beading, so I'll post the pattern once it's done.  It could a fun way to use up stuff and make pretty presents - why do I always come with bright present ideas 12/26? It was inspired by a couple coworkers - one who gave me the yarn because she loved it but didn't have a use for 2 skeins of Peppermint Heather Alpaca Cloud and thought I might, and by my  model who is tall and elegant and looks totally lovely in scarves.
And, 15 or so years ago I knit a friend these silly mittens that don't match and never thought about it again.  Last time I was visiting, she showed them to me.  Dingy, hardworn, patched, quite frankly embarassing.  How can I let someone I care for be wearing something so scanky???  So, look for a glove pattern coming in the next month or so.

Snowflake wristers available!

I posted the pattern on Ravelry - I'll add the buttons here tomorrow, should you like it and not be on Ravelry.  I love Ravelry.  I always get a kick out of how I post a new pattern and 3 seconds later 4 or 5 people have favorited it.  Strangers like my ideas and have fun with them, that's so fun.

Okay, the spouse and I are on a serious Belgian beer kick this break, so it's high time I opened another one and we started watching an awful movie.  I'll probably knit, too.

Have a great night!

Why we took our tree down a little early this year

Plus, it went up earlier this year.  Nicest tree we've ever had, needles everywhere.  Ugh.  Evil kitty!
Hope everyone had as nice a Christmas as we did!

Hope everyone's having nice holidays

It gets hard to keep up with lots of normal life stuff during the holidays (not eating like a pig, exercising, bathing) so my posting gets sporadic.  But my knitting doesn't - in fact, I get time to do more of it, which makes me very happy.  (And, for fun, my spouse and I have decided to try breaking into Mastering the art of French Cooking which is totally awesome and yes, we only stumbled on the idea of this because we watched Julie and Julia.  Love that Meryl Strep.  The Julia parts of the movie made me want to go to France and drink about a 8 gallons of wine.  The other parts of the movie made me want to drink even more wine, but for different reasons.)  So, here are two things I'd love to finish over the break, along with the wristers.  And I've been playing more with making jewelry.  Fusionbeads.com takes Paypal, so if you ever buy anything from me, you can be assured the money goes either to yarn, or to these nice people out on the West coast.
I hope everyone out there gets some time off and to see/talk to the people they love.

Wristers

Man, these things sure are pink.
They're also slightly large for my tiny, stumpy hands, but you get the idea.  They're kind of fun - ugh, as I look at these, I need to find a better hand model.  Going to jot down the pattern and post it.

Start-itis

I'm so not a pink kind of gal, but this Lipstick Palette and left over food color dyed Bare from Amy Rose, I dunno, I couldn't say no.
Fingerless Fair Isle Mitts.

Got a better picture

More cooperative weather - no fault of my amazing model.  Like it?  If you want to wear it to a holiday party, it's for sale.  I'm going to start selling my prototypes here, check the gadget on the right side "Purchase a prototype"

I also took a picture of my coworker's insanely cool handspun and kidsilk haze shirt she's making:

And I played with making a necklace:

It's done

Sadly, it's a rainy crappy day and these pictures didn't come out as well as I'd like.

Blocking

The black shows off the pattern more here, but the colors won't really show until I can wrangle some live models.
Tune in tomorrow!

I hope to take pictures tomorrow

I'm binding off the Winter Peacock.
Whiskey tango foxtrot, that last row of putting on a bead every other stitch takes a YEAR.
Hopefully I'll be able to wrangle a coworker into modeling it for me.
:)

PSA!

It's been unusually cold here, which I love.  Lots of folks I've known in my life deal with seasonal depression - I have the opposite.  I love it dark and cold.  I know, I'm kind of weird.  I have a hard time down here, it's too bright and too green all year, I out of touch with the natural rhythms - not because there aren't any, but because I don't know them.  Dark and cold is good for knitting and candle light.
And as the holidays approach, I'm going to do something I really never do - here's a PSA for knitters out there.  A co-knitter has mentioned the need for knitters to make hospital knitwear.  Specifically, stoma covers - in fact one of our local hospitals is in such short supply, the patient's families routinely recycle them.  We have an informal group of folks who knit at my work, we get together every couple weeks to knit and next week we're going to see if we can't pool cotton yarn and patterns and do some holiday hospital knitting.  'Tis the season, don't you think?  They're quick, usually quite simple, a great way to try out new stitches or use up odds and ends of yarn and there are certainly folks who would really appreciate your art.  I'll bring the camera next week so maybe we can get some snaps.
And finally, Persephone's Winter Peacock is back on the move - I ran out of beads, but more have arrived.

Happy Thanksgiving

Working on the Kauni is like eating potato chips or something; once you get going on the colors changing, you want to keep going to see how they'll resolve themselves.  This is the front steek and left hand side front, hence the pattern weirdness.

In other news, we went to Hilton Head.  It was amazing.

Kauni jacket snaps

Funny, usually I feel like my pictures don't do the yarn justice in terms of intensity of color.  Not so with Kauni.  I started the edging with two balls, then swapped to the other 2 balls to get a nice divide of body/edging.  I plan to do the same on the cowl neck and sleeves, probably not the same placement though.
I hemmed and hawed forever about where to start the balls relative to one another.  Has anyone else worked with this stuff and have any smart ideas?  I'd love to hear if there's some collective wisdom on how to use this stuff.  First I thought of keeping the rainbows close, but then I feared that one-color-off matching would give long patches of yellow and orange, blue and green, which I knew I didn't want.  Muddy, you know?  But starting across-spectrum (red - green, yellow - purple) seemed scarily loud.  Obviously, "in for a penny" thinking won here and I went with cross spectrum patterning.  Here it is again.  It's, well, cheerful, as Elsie would say.

it's been a while

So, a couple things:

I got feedback on the Daisy Mittens - they could be smaller.  True, I was probably overcompensating for making most things freakishly small because I'm kind of small.   I'll do another pair (I send test stuff to my mom to put into a craft's cooperative since down here I have little or no use for mittens and things) or maybe another design.  I have a book full of them, I just need to put them down on paper.

I started my Kauni.  Not much to take pictures of yet, but soon.  It's sort of rough feeling, but it will make a lovely, cuttable steek, methinks.  I need to finish some things, my knitting basket looks like, well nothing poetic springs to mind, so how about a horrible mess?

Finally, it's finals season where I work.  Stressed out law students, not pretty.  I've spent my day:

• helping people use staplers; sometimes with a multi-person audience (no, really, I'm not kidding)
  
• explaining print server problems which aren't actually problems
  
• calling Facilities to have someone fish our most popular study room key out of the elevator shaft (someone dropped in there over the weekend)
• handing out Advil
  

Weekend stuff

Finished the first sock, not sure if I like the three needle bind off for the ending of the sock, seems like it would be lumpy and uncomfortable if you wore these with any kind of shoe, so I might take it out and graft it later.
But we also have this crepe myrtle by the house, I've never seen it so colorful and cool looking - not only are the leaves changing, but they're changing in this pretty patterns and the older fruits make patterns and have their own colors as well.  I think I might need to dye some "fall crepe myrtle" yarn and make something leafy out of it.

Nutkin aka sanity saver socks

I like my job, I have great coworkers, for the most part, work is a non-issue for me.
Then I go to conferences and want a do over on my career because I feel like it's TOTALLY STUPID AND LAME.
The solution?
Knit socks during you conference, of course!  Here I am using up some of my spaced dyed Bare from last spring.  They're stripy-er than I'd like, but I've flirted with a.) overdying them when I'm done or b.) getting over myself and enjoying their cheerfulness.

Ech.

Our house has a mild upper respiratory infection.  Coughing, itchy eyes, headache.  Tomorrow I have a conference, but can't really get excited about any of my knitting to bring along.  The Rolfe (below) or the pink.  I'm having this weird craving to knit socks.  I hate knitting socks, what's up?  Must be a low grade fever.

Cat in the Hat scarf

So, when I was a kid, the book The Cat in the Hat really bothered me.  The chaos, the mess, the lack of calming parents . . . . but most of all, the fact that he turned all that snow pink.  Just seemed wrong to me.  Growing to adulthood has taught me not to hate pink.
So here's my CitH scarf - light on beads (I used both size 6 and 8 here) and using doubled Alpaca Cloud on size 3 needles.  Now honestly, I've always found pure alpaca to be a pain to knit with -- too slick, no resilience, too easy to drop stitches.  This isn't so bad, but the doubling does mean you need to watch what you're doing.  But it's kind of pretty I guess, it's an accessory scarf: the kind you wear inside with an outfit rather than something you wind around the neck for warmth.  I can see doing it in green or red for the holidays, very quick and not hard as a gift or something.

So maybe something smaller

I sort of got de-stashed on by a coworker (yay, thanks!) and I was thinking, maybe work these up paired and just do a scarf, keep the beading at the ends, maybe do a gradual creep up the body of the scarf (I"m not describing this well, more beads towards the ends which won't be on the neck and will show and gradiate them up to there being none up by the neck part).  A basic lace pattern scarf takes 300-500 yards and I have 440 if I work these together,
Whaddya think?

Happy Halloween

Halloween sure is more fun with a kid.
We went Trick orTreating in the rain, it was fun.  We have a boatload of candy (hello holiday season of weight gain!).  Here's how Grover Underwood looked:

Got some knitting done on Putnam's but fingering weight is slow and so nothing new to photograph.  I'm trying to show some discipline and finish a few things before embarking on some more new things.  Such a magpie!

Happy All Saints Day!

Halloween

Nasty, ugly, horrid rasta hat is done!  One size fits all -- kids and pets that is.

So I now have an official UGH! on Ravelry!  Golly, that thing looks like a mutant candy corn on his head!
In other news, I ran out of beads for the Night Peacock, grrr, so I have to order more.  So I've dusted off Putnam's, which I love.

Olympian is done - pattern now available

Oh look, more pictures of me with no head.
Pattern now available via Ravelry for $2.00, I'll put up a link here soon.

It's fun and fast, would make a good Christmas knit for a medium sized person you love with a lizard's constitution.
And now for something completely different. 
I love to work with nice fibers, subtle colors, things that are soft and have a great hand.

Which is why making a hunter orange, acrylic Rasta hat for the small one's costume is just so sad for me.  Putridity ugly, but fast.

oh yeah

There w wnere 2 other things to do today.  The first was to redo the Camp Half Blood tshirt for the little's costume, much better this time.  The first time it got smeary and the tree was too big.  This time I cut the stencils apart and arranged them and taped them down being sure to wash them and dry them between each stenciling session.  I like this one.
And on a related note, I want to finish the Olympian and post the pattern.  Very simple and I'm in love with the colors.  For once in my life I want to make a rollneck that's not so long it looks like a dress.  Being 5'1" doesn't help with that - the urge to wear big clothes makes you look childlike in that bad, no one loved you enough to dress you right way or just dumpy and fat.  Hurtling towards 40, I aspire to look neither.

A day at home

Today I have a teacher conference with the little one's teacher so took the day off because a.) it's in the middle of the day b.) I needed to meet the Comcast tech at home c.) spouse and I could get our H1N1 mist and hopefully make ourselves somewhat illness resistant.
So I finished cleaning out and reinstalling the pump and filter in the pond, washed the columns of the porch, cleaned up the garage a bit and put up the Halloween decorations.  Now I'm poaching chicken for some chicken salad which is for tomorrow.  Tonight I'm going to make these.  Mmmm.  Of course it's in the low 60's here today and so I have the kitchen window open and the kitty has been pinned to it ever since. Below are some pictures of a.) the finished soccer mittens on and b.) the sweater I'm making for the small one in Cotlin. 
I also need to take a shower before I go to the conference.  :)