Nanna

Man, kittens get big fast! Indy is probably doubled in size since coming home 9 days ago.
Here's Nanna - and here's Indy attacking it. And here's out Christmas tree, which he did NOT pull down on himself today while home alone with the tree. We're proud of that. Oh, and we have a pretty great tree stand.

6999

That would be Indy titling my post for me, tiny kitty feet on the number pad.
I'm more than half through with Nanna, but knitting with a little kitten playing with your yarn slows things down. Maybe I'll get my act together and take snap tomorrow.
Right life is just in the general holiday haze.

Hope you had a nice holiday

There's nothing to put a crimp in your knitting and spinning like a brand new kitten.
Meet Indy (as in Indiana Jones) - 8 weeks, 2 lb.
He already loves to play with knitting needles and yarn as you work.

It's the day before Thanksgiving

So more cooking and cleaning than anything else.

Here's what's on for after dinner tonight:
http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/White-Chocolate-Mousse-with-Dark-Chocolate-Sauce-2639
And for Thanksgiving Breakfast:
http://baking.about.com/od/sweetrolls/r/ultimtecinnroll.htm

And something we'll undoubtedly make again this weekend:
http://www.cookography.com/2007/french-onion-soup

No, really; you should make this. It's amazing.
Have a great holiday everyone!

Nanna! Again!

It suddenly occurred to me late last week - hey, I got that navy Encore Worsted last year to make the little one a sweater, and, well, it's unusually cold down here this fall.
So I'm doing Nanna again. It's a lovely little pattern and it's going pretty quickly. Hopefully he'll like it and it won't itch. But he's like his dad and they both run hot, not like me, so we'll see.
I've also had a breakthrough with Ravelry - they now let you load pictures directly from your own source, so I don't have to load the pictures to a Flickr account, then to Ravelry, which really kind of made that site more work than I was motivated to put in.
As a librarian, I deal with social networking software some (and have to listen to people discuss it far more [in fact, if you know certain things about me, stringtheory2.0 makes a lot of sense]) but for the most part it doesn't do much for me. Maybe it focuses too much on the social for me. I like Ravelry for all the combined brainpower; the way all kinds of patterns and yarns are cataloged in there. Anyway, they've made it easier for my lazy self to make use of it. Yay!

Halfway there on Frost Flowers - more predictable results of multitasking

Slow progress (though last night I really got on a role while watching the football game, I think skipping working out helped but holiday season is not the time to start skipping working out) I made it to the halfway point last night. I'm now on the second 440 yd. ball and just have to mirror back. I think I'll have the diagonal go the opposite way for interest on the other side. And no, I'm not going to match the bead placement on the other side. Threading on all these beads takes enough time without getting that OCD, thanks anyhow.
To ensure a match on the far side (just on the flower part) I counted out the right number of white and dark aqua beads and set them aside in a little baggie (inside of the big baggie all this crap lives in - such an attractive addition to any living room, plastic bags full of yarn and tubes of beads) so the two edges would be exactly the same.
So far this is my favorite of my beaded attempts. I think using multiple colors is what makes it so fun. The white/clear ones are from my friend Elsie and her daughter Stina who were in upstate NY and were kind enough to try and help me find the right beads for this project. I'd already fallen in love with the tanzanite and aqua but these white sort of pull the whole thing together. I'm including this close up, but I really need a shot outside, the flash washes these out too much. Well, if you click on it you can see it better I guess. But it looks all misshapen, 'cause it needs to be blocked.

Meh, I don't like it

So, you can see from the pictures of the fleece that the colors are really lovely. They are - I love them. I loved spinning them.
Plied together, not so much.
I need to rethink this one.
I might like it better knit up.
Or I might not.
I guess I need to confront my dislike of high contrast marled yarn. Even if it's of my own design.
Comments and suggestions welcome.

Misty Mt. Chocorua

It looks more teal here than it really is - it's more green in real life. Bobbin #1 is all the Mountain Teal and the second bobbin is gray with a little bit of teal spliced in. I'll post a picture once I get some plied, which should be interesting.

wow, that's really ugly, or the Messenger Bag of Doom

So, at home today, waiting for roofers.
I pulled out the sewing machine to fix some hems.
I also pulled out the leftover fleece from the Halloween costume this year to make a knitting bag.
It's based loosely on a messenger bag design, and I made 2 smaller bag inside for sticking scissors etc., in. I made it out of fleece because I get tired of bags being so rough they make my yarn pill before I even knit with it. When working on something complicated, like a Fassett sweater, I used to use an old pillowcase to bring it with me, but that's inconvenient (no handles or compartments) and kind of makes you look, well, insane, actually.
Boy, is this thing ugly!
Maybe if I had picked out colors I wanted to use instead of using up leftovers . . . I dunno. But's very soft and I think would look like more with a real project in it. I kind of want to crawl into it myself.
Other things to do today - making pizza and finishing plying that Gotland.

No new projects, just some progress snaps

So, I'm nearly done spinning the pound of Gotland; I should finish tonight and ply it. It's been a nice companion while watching CNN way too late into the night. And here's the Frost Flowers shawl - if you click on it to look at the image more closely, you can see the colors of the beads better. Ever tried to place/space stuff like this randomly? I'm firmly convinced human brains don't do random. Take a look at the darker green and white beads, am I achieving random? Not really. But it's coming out the way I imagined, and that happens rarely enough that I'm enjoying it.

Spinning more stuff that doesn't belong to me

Here's some lovely chocolate alpaca from Yarn or Death . I've plied it with itself, and plied it with some multi color roving from Zeilinger. But, until she gets to see it and come down with a verdict, I'm going to work on the final pound of Gotland. I sent the spun Gotland to my mother see if she wanted it and it was promptly appropriated. But 2 lb. wasn't enough.
Then I'll start on the grey and green.

It travels

Yarn or Death was very happy with the first installment of her yarn. And it's still so shiny and pretty, I'm still a little surprised considering how hard the roving felt. Here it is sitting on my messy desk at work.
YoD is traveling tomorrow and is all excited about the number of hours in the car - knitting time, don't you know.
Tonight will be an Ash Ketchem junk food festival -- yay! -- the start of overeating season has arrived.
Have a wonderful Halloween/weekend!

Again, no picture

It's been really cold down here this week, which I love, being from a cold place.
While I plan to ply the blue silk/merino tonight, I may or may not have a picture of it to show before going to bed. But I did get all 8 oz. spun up last night.
So, a random thought from the past weekend - Apple Crisp. (Note, we made on big one, cooked it for 40 minutes, used Granny Smiths and Macintosh apples, added a dash of ginger, nutmeg and cloves to the apples, and a full stick of butter for the topping.) We generally try to roll out some new dish in our house every other weekend or so when the weather gets cold, this one was a keeper.
Thanks to Lori for inspiring me to share that one.

A picture of that silk and merino blend

Funnily enough, I usually have trouble getting colors to come out as vivid and bright as they are in real life in my pictures. Tonight, the spinning is shining through. Must be the silk, I guess.
It's so nice and soft, I want to get it all spun (8oz. really shouldn't take long) and see how it looks when plied.
Hopefully I'll remember to ask YoD tomorrow whose roving this is so I can give them proper credit.

No picture (yet); the new addiction

On the topic of 2 great tastes that go great together? Silk and wool!
Yarn or Death went to SAFF and had a great time. I'm jealous, because I miss going to things like the NH Sheep and Wool Festival. Raising sheep and other woolly things this far south seems, well, kind of mean to me as it's so hot. But anyway . . .
Before she was leaving she asked if I ever spun with non-animal fibers. I explained my spinning is really good enough for me to have ventured into cotton, hemp, stuff like that. But I'm not as dense as I look, so I said "if you see anything at SAFF that you really like, feel free to buy it and I'll spin it for you - unless you want to do it yourself." YoD isn't ready to start spinning, but I now have 8oz. each of silk/merino blend in summer sky blue (2 oz. of which I spun last night while watching the Colts and Titans) and some chocolate brown alpaca.
Before (15 years ago - that's scary, when did I get so old?) I'd worked with silk, but it was in brick form, and I got very frustrated and decided I hated silk.
I was wrong.
I'll post pictures of that silk/merino tonight. Maybe I can haul the wheel out onto the porch before the light goes away.
The pre-drafting is different than straight wool - the silk gets really smooshed down sort of locked together, so after pulling the roving into quarters, I then find it works best to fluff it out from the side, turn it 90 degrees and fluff it again. The roving goes from hard, squeaky and dense (do you know what I mean about silk fibers being squeaky?) to soft and cloudy and suddenly very shiny.
So, what's worse that suddenly discovering your taste for something wickedly expensive like silk and wool roving? Finding someone else insane enough to fund your problem. Even YoD saw the danger here.

Weekend before Halloween

Night pictures don't show colors very well, especially not these blues. But I'll try and get one in daylight.
I'm thinking of calling this one "Frost Flowers".
And we carved our pumpkin this afternoon. We stopped by the courthouse down town to see what the local schools had done to see if we could get inspired.
The pumpkin design was the little one's idea, start to finish (I just work here).

Another version of the Matrix

Snow with shadows is the colorway. Since I'm getting a little tired of doing the same pattern over and over, I'm going to mix it up a little bit this time. I'll use the leaf pattern at the edges and diagonal eyelet pattern for the main body of the shawl.

Some stuff (no pictures, sorry)

So I've moved past the neck of the linen stitch pullover - meaning I've cast on to close up the neck again, and once I get back down to just the back, I'll take another picture.
I have this idea for small knit messenger bags - using the linen stitch again for strength and stability - in wool. Maybe I'll play with that. Or maybe this should be where I learn to crochet. (I can hear Yarn or Death laughing as I type this.) Something maybe 10" by 12" with a should strap? I'll maybe play with that.
So, I hear that yarn I made for my sister in law has become a sweater! I'm hoping for a picture . . .

9

Happy nine year anniversary, hon.
It would be nice if we could spend it hiking in the Whites, but it sure beats not celebrating 9 years.

Once again, asking you to try and visualize this

Trust me, here . . .
These two plied together - sort of soft and misty looking. Like a foggy mountain-side.
Maybe it's something you have to see.
In my head, I'm picturing Mt. Chocorua on a misty late Sept. or early Oct. day.