WIPs & FO(!)

Learned a lesson this weekend--spending time with non-yarny friends is not the time to work on complicated patterns like gloves. Not that there were any knitting tragedies, you understand, I just didn't have the available concentration to make progress on my second glove.

I did make great time on the scarf (it's simply row after row of garter) and passed the half-century mark in my star dishcloth total. Now the next step is to convince people to buy them at the craft fair in a couple weeks so I'll have money to replace all that yarn, or money in my yarn bank, or... well, you know what I mean.


And I've been knitting along on my first sweater sleeve. Of course, I have found any number of other patterns I'd like to knit, and then there's the tote bag and needle case I want to sew from fabric and a table runner I got at Ikea and... Suffice to say there's not enough time in my days to do everything I want to. Pesky job.

No "Second Glove" Syndrome Here!

I was a bit intimidated to tackle the second glove without Ann sitting right next to me saving me when I screwed up, but then I realized I'd need another glove before she got home at Christmas. It's bound to get cold before then. So I took a deep breath and started. I'm proud to say I knit the cuff and all the cables are exactly as they should be, no Moroccan arches to interrupt the symmetry. Beautiful!

I cast on another bias scarf, too, in some pretty wool I got at Jo-Ann's. This is easy to tuck in my bag and take to work or on errands--and I love the colors, so unlike me to like pastels but I do.

I'm two dishcloths from my goal of having 50 by November 9th. Think I'll make it? Yeah me too; although I have slacked off on the "one a day" thing, there's no danger of me quitting making them altogether.



And...I got my Ravelry invite! Woohoo! Now I have to take pictures of my stash and decide where in the queue to put my projects and upload a crapload of pictures to Flickr so I can put them on Ravelry. Did you know I'm on Ravelry now?

Gloves!

Ann was home the last few days and it was absolutely fantastic to have another knitter in the house. We had a whirlwind 2 days trolling all the yarn shops in town and digging through my stash of yarn and patterns. Our Christmas gift stashes are now full to overflowing with ideas and nice wool yarn we'd never have bought if it hadn't been on clearance. We love clearance bins! I had gotten some Lion Brand Cashmere Blend when Ben Franklin went out of business but wasn't sure what I'd make with it. Then I bought One Skein with my Jo-Ann's coupon, paged through it and I knew.

Gloves.

Gloves with a cabled cuff and real fingers. I had never used dpns before but Ann has made socks so I figured she could teach me. We will draw a veil over the awkward beginning of my adventure with dpns, and I'm still not at all sure I could start a project on my own, but suffice to say that Ann's patience is limitless. By the end of Friday's knitting we had a cuff, hand & thumb gusset. I have a few, let's just call them, freeform areas in my honeycomb cables, but as my grandpa used to say, a man running for his life will never notice. We spent Saturday, off and on, knitting tiny little tubes, one by one, and by bedtime on Saturday we each had one glove! Too cool. So much fun sitting knitting, talking, and laughing with my daughter. We did good.

Wanna Know How Warm It Has Been?

Last Friday when I was mowing the lawn I noticed something spring-like rather than fall-ish.

It's the forsythia; it's blooming; it's October. That's how warm it has been in WI. I heard on the radio that it's like the 7th warmest year on record. I keep putting on a jacket and then sweating. I'm kind of a slow learner or maybe a creature of habit, mid-October=jacket weather, not t-shirt. I like it warm, I do, I just can't seem to wrap my feeble mind around it right now.

FO, Dishcloths & a Sleeve!

I ran into the same chevron problem with ending the scarf as I had in starting it, but this time I figured it out myself--after knitting and frogging a couple of inches of scarf a few times. I didn't say I was fast, I just said I had eventually figured it out. Next time I'll make the scarf with more colors and shorter solid sections, maybe closer hues to get some blending too. I like the striped parts best. Doesn't the scarf look all casual & relaxed on the couch?


Dishcloth production has fallen off to a more reasonable rate--just over one per day. I'll still have more than 50 finished by the fair date Nov. 10. Hey, I should count. Maybe I have 50 now. Be right back...nope, not yet, only 42. But that's still pretty good output in 4 weeks.


So last night I didn't have the scarf to knit on after supper. What to do? What to do? I could cast on a sleeve since I stopped at the yarn shop and got some of those nice slick Crystal Palace bamboo needles on my way to work. So I did. It's a good idea I stole from the Yarn Harlot to start on a sleeve. Sleeves are narrower than the back (well, duh) so it's not like knitting a minivan cozy, plus the fun stuff, like stripes, starts early in this pattern. Well, patterns, since I'm taking the stripes from one pattern and the construction from another. I want to try raglan sleeves instead of drop shoulder sleeves. See the stripes? Cool, huh? Another 2 row black one comes next, then 2 rows of taupe, then 4 or 6 rows of cream. I geek out when stripes grow off the needles; I love watching them appear.

Progress!

I was so excited yesterday when I realized that it was time to start changing over from off-white to black on the bias scarf. It's going faster than I imagined. And just in time too. Monday the high temp was 86, on Tuesday the high was a very cool & windy 51. Welcome to autumn in WI.

And I took a better picture of the capelet so that you can see the cable. I'm very proud of it, even though I'm still not sure I'd ever wear the thing.

This week I slacked off to "only" one dishcloth a day. See? I told you not to get too impressed with my output. I still like making them and revel in the way the colors stack up as I crochet around and around.

I haven't mentioned it in a while but it's been a week or two since I noticed that several days will go by and I won't think about smoking at all. I'll take Chantix for another week and then be done with that crutch. I'm confident.

And now for the farm report...

Here we are in Wisconsin at the end of the first week of October, it's 83 degrees and humid, and the garden's still going strong-- the okra's still blooming & making yummy pods, the cherry tomatoes are blooming again, and we harvested our first Brussels sprouts. Yum!

Dishcloth, dishcloth, dishcloth... fish

I got a new skein of variegated yarn a couple weeks ago (on clearance) and realized last night I hadn't knit a fish with it yet. Horrors! I was amazed at how quickly it went. Fish are (is?) what I learned to knit on so I think of them as something I have to work at, but evidently knitting 2 purses, 2 pairs of fingerless gloves, and half a scarf has ramped up my knitting skills. But not enough to knit a sweater. I have to keep telling myself that because I found a sweater pattern I like that uses big needles and big yarn, and I'm a sucker for those. But I am not going to set myself up for frustration by starting to knit a sweater. I'm not.

I discovered yesterday (when I put down my garter stitch scarf [seen here draped on the pineapple sage plant--isn't it pretty?] because my left arm was sore)










why I'm not frogging the capelet.

Aside from being inordinately proud that I'm managing to knit a different color edging without going totally mad and making a single-cross cable, knitting on it doesn't make my left arm sore. I don't know if it's the size 11 needles, the fact that they're plastic, or that they're circular, but when I knit on the capelet my arm is fine, when I knit on the scarf it aches. Go figure. (I never pretended to be normal.)

WIPs

I got all excited by a bias knit scarf pattern I saw on Mason-Dixon Knitting's blog so I cast that on and knit like the wind to get to the first color change area. It's hard to see in the picture but it starts with cranberry, then goes to what Wool Ease calls natural heather which is kind of grayed out cream, then I'll add on black. I like it, now that a commenter on MDK noted that the stitches of first row after the angle were reversed, and it's not going off like some sort of chevron.

The other picture is the Bits and Bobs KAL capelet I've been working on for about 4 weeks. I'm busy crocheting dishcloths and knitting the scarf, plus I'm not sure I'll ever wear the capelet, but I can't seem to frog it and move on. You can't see but there's a single cross cable at either end of the off-white. I'm foolishly impressed with myself.

Felting Results

I spent all of Sunday going up and down the stairs checking the felting progress and resetting the washer for another cycle. It took forever! And the 2 colors of yarn didn't felt at the same rate or to the same degree. It was a really good idea to put the parts in a zippered pillow case--the washer's parts would have been totally choked with balls of fuzz without it. I'm not sure I'm happy with how it turned out, but the pieces really need a shave.