Pictures that stink

I'm halving the lines of beads on this version, both to keep the shawl lighter and to speed up knitting it. The second picture is cr*p, but colors look more realistic.

Persephone's Peacocks

So, I started on the formal wear version of the peacock. It's going to be hard to get decent pictures of, but this should give you the idea.
And it occurred to me:
Persephone lives half the year above ground in fields and tending crops (first peacock) and half the year in the Underworld with Hades (this peacock). One of the legends I read talked about Hades building Persephone a garden made of precious metals and jewels, flowers and trees and birds and animals all made from gold and gems, which sort of works for this colorway I think. So these two could be a set. (Yes, I know peacocks are Hera's birds, but I'm riffing I guess.)
I've been listening to Bullfinch's Mythology and it's lots of fun (goes with the Percy Jackson books). Got this stuff on the brain.

Cross that off the list

Daisy mittens are done - need to be blocked, but done.
My patient coworker modeled them for me. Happily, she has normal sized hands. Mine are so freakishly dwarf-like it makes designing mittens challenging, they always come out too small. So when I though "oh no, I made purple oven mittens" I was wrong. Love to be wrong like that.
I really liked the Imagination to work with. If you like the pattern, it's available on Ravelry, or you can email me to request the pattern.

Neighbor, can you spare a cup of time?

Soccer season has started! Which is tons of fun. This is a great age.
And there goes any illusion of time.
So, I'm working on a written instruction version of the Peacock, which is slow going, and Putnam's shawl is lovely, but not quick. I'm nearly done with the mittens, and I find myself coming up with zillions of new things I want to do. Oh, and I have one or two friends I want to catch up to someday.
So here's why I started this blog in the first place, so I can use the internet as my external harddrive back up!
I want to design a shawl in Gloss Winter Night and design it in a water/wave pattern. I had thought blue beads, but maybe white or grey instead? Or would that look like lint? Such a fine line between clever and stupid, to quote Spinal Tap.
I want to design Adria, which will have raised leaves with just a few beads for sparkle, in dusty pink. Need to dye that yarn myself. Have yarn, not time.
I want to design the Posies shawl, shaped like the Peacock, but with small stylized flowers in it, inspired by Yarn Or Death's doodles. I have the YO pattern and everything.
I want to design a beaded cardigan, using the wave pattern I used in the peacock, only it would mostly be plain st. st. with edge beads and patterns - too much and it would be heavy (and so stretch out) and not comfortable.
I want to get busy with the Olympian pull over - I really love that yarn.
Most folks want more money, which, I admit would be great, but I really want more time. And I'm not one of those cool folks who sleep 3 hours a night.

Random

Happy Friday.

Done, and weaving in ends

I'll take an action picture of this one once it's got all the ends woven in and is blocked. I really love this pattern, and it looks pretty good on. More soon.

Doesn't look like much

Well, if you ever read this blog, you know that it's most long stretches of working on stuff that doesn't make for good pictures punctuated by tons a newly started projects. Anyhoo, I'm about to knit the arms onto the white sweater. I picked up the 45 sts. on each side on needles this evening and I'll knit them in place tonight, so maybe I'll have a picture of something remotely garment-y tomorrow.
High ho.
Hope everyone is enjoying their end of summer weeks.
Oh yeah, Halloween costume 2009 - Grover the Satyr from The Last Olympian books.
Can I make fur legs?

Update on Putnam's

Yeah, I pulled it out, it's just going to be a big rectangle, but a lovely one.
And I'm trying to update the Peacock pattern for a larger size and English directions on the charts.

Olympian pullover

Here are my test swatches for the Percy Pullover. After much hemming and hawing, I think I'll work it RS facing, stripy, but not too stripy. The wrong side is nice, but too muddy, methinks.

Not happy with it, not sure

Okay, Putnam's? I was designing it to have a hole for the head where I would then pick up for a collar. But will a big rectangular dickie with a collar look good, or like cr*p?
I'm kinda thinking I should tear it back and just do the big rectangle.
Any ideas?

Help I never knew I needed

Wrapping presents. :)

I've gotten a lot of really great feedback on Ravelry since posting the Peacock, which is really nice to hear.
I hope everybody has a wonderful day.

I did it

I finished and posted the pattern for the Peacock shawl. That took forever!
Teach me not to take good notes while I knit.
Right now it's on Ravelry, but I'll put a link up here too.

Dang, I'm blind

This not some piece of metaphysical wisdom -- rather, the results of taking pictures of one's off-white knitting in the summer sun of Georgia. In fact, there are 2 since I unearthed something that's been tabled since late spring.
Here's the first - some outside closeups of Putnam's shawl. I'm really fond of this, but it's been sidelined of late because I've gotten distracted. However, the eponymous friend wrote this week and described to me projects she's trying to get finished for decades. So now I'm inspired to clean out my knitting basket.






Remember this white pull over I started? It's coming together now, I started the neck this morning and these sleeves should go pretty quickly. It's really fun to knit and looks great on, sadly the pattern is a leaflet from the early 90's so I can't tell anyone where to get a copy. :(

And then of course there's Indy - we have siding being replaced today so he's prowling around being unhappy. He also hates the laptop as it vies with him for my attention. He thinks. Or I think that's what he thinks; for all I know he's coming up with uses for the cold fusion reactor he's designed.
Guess I'll never know.

The sea god and other thoughts

Mmmm, still thinking about City Tweed. We've been reading Rick Riordan's books about Percy Jackson (if you have a kid 7-12, they're pretty fun, and then you can go back and watch Clash of the Titans and the Sinbad movies and talk about mythology) and I was thinking of making a pretty simple pullover that used various City Tweed colors together so you would get gentle color movement throughout the sweater as a whole. Percy could be Porpoise, Poseidon and Orca mainly, with lesser amounts of Enchanted, Splash, and Morning Glory. I think Grover (browns and greens) and Thalya (wine, purple and blue (sp?) have colorways in there too. Anyway, occurred to me over the weekend.