Socks n stuff

So here are a couple pictures - the shawl on the rug, that transition in bead colors, that's for real, not a trick of the light.  I'm almost down to my 4th skein and then I can do the scarf and submit the tested pattern to Knitpicks.  I'll be excited to get this out into the wider world, the pattern is very easy and rewarding (she says modestly, sheesh).  Also, further down you'll see my wedding socks I'm free wheeling for my college roommates' wedding (she doesn't want more stuff, they already own a house, and she's still wearing some ratty old socks I made in COLLEGE - that's like 15+ years ago!).  I think I'll make them slippers, too, lined ones perhaps.  September is suddenly seeming very soon.

I also got the invitation to submit a piece to the Lyme Utility Club annual  fall fundraiser (this may sound like an honor, but I'm related to one of the organizers, so I kind of already had a horse in this race) and my thought this year was to design an intarsia stole of fish -- tropical colors on black, lined with a watered silk. The design concept is either fish spaced apart on a plain ground or do an interlocking MC Escher idea.  Any opinions?

Sorry to have been away

It's been busy - summer camp and stuff like that. Oh, and IPhones - the spouse and I got them. Productivity my butt they're quite the way to waste time.
Anyhow, I have gotten to skein 3 of 4 on the shawl and now I have wedding socks to make.
I'll post pictures soon - of I could do it from the phone I would ....

1/4 done

The last picture is the least photogenic as my husband points out, but it gives you the best sense of what the patterns actually look like.  These first two are more like glam shots, I guess.
Jury is still out on whether I'll work this one straight across or join in the center - any votes?

Progress for that Knitpicks thing

Okay this might seem like decent progress given it is beaded knitting, but actually it is a very easy pattern I've devised.  And I couldn't tell if I liked it or not all weekend.  I'd work on it, hate the bead placement, rip it out, redo, work for 2 hours one night, get up the next morning convinced I was going to trash it.  Somehow it survived my basically having something like KMT (knitting-menstrual-tension) all over it until today when I could take it to work to get coworker feedback.  They made me feel better about it, that the multiple motions meant to give the idea of small waves lapping a beach were working, one even had the brilliant idea to take it outside to see if natural light brought out the sea glass-ness of the beads.  Thanks guys! So, I'll take an outdoor shot once I get a bit more done.  I also want to do it in gray with grey green beads as a scarf  . . .   Here's what we have thus far, plus my hand for scale (sorry if the light nail polish makes me look like an alien - [see number 6 in that link, I first saw this as a teenager back in the 80's]):

And, lucky me, I needed vacuum bags and what do you know, Amazon to the rescue.  So, I went for the extra that got me free shipping - it's LOVELY, totally worth the 19 bucks!

Oh yes, and finally, on the fate of the Lion Hat.  The nice people who commissioned that totally random piece of baby-ware?  Apparently they loved it - honestly.  I was totally prepared to have to do a re-do (they wanted the background in white or something) as one needs to be prepared to do when designing for folks who don't knit or do any of this stuff, but no need I guess.  Now I have leftovers.  Maybe I'll make a baby sweater . . .
Oh, got another idea - an intarsia shawl, lined with silk, with a fish pattern on a black ground . . .

Have beads, just doesn't look like a lot yet

You can't see the beads very well, and you'll probably look at the colors and go "what were you thinking?" but just trust me right now - the matte glass is really nice, subtle, but nice, and the blue has purple in it and the purple has blue in it, I think this will work . . .

I think I have waves

I've adapted a pattern called traveling vines to give the gentle movement of waves.  I'm not sure I'll use beads quite this way, I may use them more in patches, staggered, and vary from dark to light to give the feeling of movement, but I like the pattern.  If you open the image, you can see it larger, that will help.
The one down at the bottom is something called fishtail lace, I think that would make for a suitable border.

More swatching

I got a nice comment here about my swatch, and some really helpful feedback at the weekly knitting gang at work (there was a lot of love for the clear and light blue beads, the darker were seen to be too purple, perhaps).  I've decided that while my swatch had some things I liked about it, it was more angular than I wanted.  The pattern I came up with is nice, but it didn't look enough like waves, I wanted something more gentle, less corner-y.  So I have some more ideas to play with and I ordered some matte beads, I want to give those a try too.  Basically, right now I have a lot of variables to nail down, so there will be a lot more swatches coming..
I also want the design to have motion, I want to capture the idea of small breaking waves, but also open the design up to other colorways, like a soft green that would look like marsh grass:
For yarns I was thinking Eucalyptus maybe paired with Cattail for depth and for the beads some combination  of these:

 http://www.fusionbeads.com/shop/product/27642/
http://www.fusionbeads.com/shop/product/27663/
http://www.fusionbeads.com/shop/product/27560/
http://www.fusionbeads.com/shop/product/27641/
I also want to make the design so it can be scaled down, so there's a scarf version.  So, lots of swatches coming soon.  Free shipping = slow shipping.  Sigh.
I'm sure that so many options freaks some people out.  I find it totally invigorating - not in every aspect of my life, but I sure do love to design stuff.
Thanks for the help and input, pictures soon!

Swatches and muffins

In case you hadn't noticed, I love to bake.
I'm making buttermilk dried cherry muffins right now.
I'm also thinking I  like my pattern, but maybe these aren't the right beads:

The sample is very small, I know.  I'm thinking maybe I want to use matte beads, so they look like sea glass.
I need votes . . . .
What about these? http://www.fusionbeads.com/shop/product/27565/
http://www.fusionbeads.com/shop/product/27625/
and these
http://www.fusionbeads.com/shop/product/27500/

Back from vacation

So I'm still swatching, so no pic of that yet.  I didn't take the swatch with me to NC as I didn't feel like fussing with stupid tubes of beads.  Hopefully tomorrow.
Ashville was nice, Mount Mitchell was amazing.  Highest point on the east coast at 6,684 ft.  Lovely.  Look, no fooling. Don't know if I've mentioned this, but I have this ambition to put together a collection of patterns themed around East Coast hiking.  The how to get it published was what kept me from doing it.  I guess I now have no excuse.  Hiking this weekend gave me ideas for 'Mount Mitchell' a men's aran in dark green heathered yarn and 'Trail to Craig' (this pictures were taken from Mitchell, Craig and the trail between them) which would be a bohus style cardigan done in forget me not colors - bright and pale greens, light tan, soft blue and yellow.   There are many other ideas and hikes - sadly, I didn't have a good camera back when we hiked those.  Better get my butt in gear, age doesn't make hiking any easier.

I'm not dead

Just stalled.  I need to take a snap of the finished hat (with tassels!) before mailing it and finally figure out a lace and beads pattern that looks like water for my Ravelry shawl.  I can see it in my mind, but so far my test swatches aren't much too look at.
And I've been going to 1.5 hours of soccer clinics every night after work.  Kids, what a time sink!
:)

Finishing a tiny hat and saving some frogs

The frogs are a lot smaller than the hat.  Dad was mowing and the yard was teeming with frogs, so we needed to save them.  They're very small and fast, but cute.  And no, even if you spend you allowance on a tank, you can't keep them in your bedroom.

Peacock is done, LION

I was going to take a picture of the peacock now that it's done, but it's all rumpled, not blocked and actually quite boring.  I'll hold off for action photos while I dye it.
But here's the final version of the lion hat (took 4 tries)

Some news

Okay, I'm on my third take of the Lion hat, I've almost got it.  Comfy fingering is lovely, I really like the colors, but charts take a couple goes through to get right - on paper you think it will look like something and when you first knit it goes all Rorschach on you.
Speaking of Knitpicks, the coordinator for the Independent Designer Partnership program at Knit Picks asked me if I'd be interested in designing something for them.  I was absurdly thrilled, but not sure what I should do.  Thinking on it (turn the bunnies into a baby sweater in Comfy fingering, a new beaded shawl, ?), if you have a suggestion let me know!
White Peacock is maybe 3 rows from being done, I doubt I'll get to dye it before June or July because I need a really hot day, but my dying last week gave me confidence I can get the colors I want.
AND my spouse got home last week.  Yay!  And last night we finally ventured into the magical land of RiffTrax.  I haven't laughed that hard in a long time.
Happy weekend, more pics soon!

October is now available

Pattern now available, $5.00 on Ravelry.  I sized it woman's medium to 3XL - and if you knew me and math, you would know that having done so makes me want to charge $50 a copy for the freakin' thing.  Ouch.  Head.
I slap a link up here in a few days.

Sort of like a litter of kittens

You can tell they're related, but they're all different.

And now for something completely different

I'm going to do some testing for the peacock, see how the greens play together.
Wish me luck.

In mourning

I just finished Dennis Lehane's Shutter Island and I'm sad.

Yes, you can see the ending coming a ways off, yes it's easy as a reader to become enamored of fictional plots that are neat and organized and aesthetic in a way real people never are, but I kind of fell in love with Teddy.  This may say more about my never ending love affair with lost causes than about the book itself, but it was great.

And sad. And why so sad?  If you haven't read the book or seen the movie but want to, I don't want to ruin it for you but . . .

It's sad because the story is so full of loss, and the trope that losing something you love tears away a part of you - part of your soul that you form in these relationships and that you'll always miss and can never recover.  Because love and relationships are far more than the sum of their parts (good and bad parts).  Cawley and Chuck mourn Teddy, Teddy mourns Dolores and yet at the end wishing to save someone you love, even being willing to take the bullet for them if could (in whatever form the bullet takes), isn't enough if you aren't honest, if you won't really do what it takes and sometimes that means admitting you can't fix it without help.  Teddy is trapped and alone, but the novel makes it clear he didn't have to be and he has moments where even he sees the choices he didn't make.  And the novel also does a great job of painting these relationships that are clear and loving and special and that lapse into pathology with fearful ease.

Okay, done now, the next one will be about knitting, promise.

18,200

Something that came up over the weekend - the 10,000 rule.  I hadn't heard of it.
I just figured out I've about doubled that in knitting.  My estimate is 10 hr./week, 52 wk/year, for 35 years.  That's averaging years I traveled a lot and other garbage (dating, you know, junk like that).

Life is dull

You know how you think some quiet time would be nice, so you could get some things done?  And does it ever work out that way for you?  Because it doesn't for me.  I think "oh, that would be nice" but it's not; it's lonely and sucky.
My husband is in Fort Worth at a conference.  I hate it.  Any time he goes away, which is rare, I get very lonely and sad and do nothing but clean the house and wait for him to come home like a lab waiting by the front door.  Knitting, spinning, designing anything like that all loses it's interest for me.  We have Skype this time around so that actually makes things better (I know what a hotel room in FW looks like and can even kind of see the stock yards out his window), but life is very empty and dull.
I just added an early season of MI5 to the streaming queue and I'm nearly done with the peacock blank, so I'll work on that a bit and watch episodes I've never seen.

Pattern request

I got a call from my mom who has been asked to come up with a baby hat that riffs off the Lion's mascot - the parents to be are big fans.  This might work better as a little sweater or a set????  So she asked for my help.
My first excuse to play with Comfy Fingering!  yay . . . .