Not knitting

I bought a little loom in October. It's a Cricket, and it's all kinds of of adorable. First thing on and off it is this scarf:



Amy King at Spunky Eclectic has beautiful checkered scarf kits, and this one was called Cheeseburger. I love how the kettle-dyed effect of the yarn shows up in the checkers. I still have enough yarn for a matching hat, too! I'm looking forward to experimenting with weaving more. It's not as portable as knitting, but it's fun!

I finished the fingerless mittens from last time.

Appropriately matching-but-for-different-hands, and they're already living with their new owner, who likes them a lot.

Now back to the orange sweater. I have lots of tv on TiVo and dvd, and a few days off before Friday. It could totally still happen by the Iron Bowl.

Seriously?

I've been having a lot of Stupid Knitting Errors lately. The Orange Sweater has been ripped out enough that I'm kind of amazed the yarn is still holding up. There was the Hideous Sleeve Incident, and the Unfortunately Giant Original Body. Never mind the usual stuff that happens with knit-purl patterns (oh no, I reverted to k2p2 instead of k4p2!) Anyway, after knitting nothing but the Orange Sweater for a couple weeks, I self-diagnosed with a pretty severe case of project fatigue, and went about looking for something else.

I started a pair of fingerless mittens for a friend a month or so ago. I knit the first one no problem. She tried it on and pronounced it Good. I went and cast on the second right away, but they soon languished after I finished the ribbing. I retrieved them from the bottom of my WIP basket this week. She asked for them back in the spring, and I said it'd probably be getting cool before I got to them. I didn't plan on making her wait this long though. Thursday night I started the thumb gusset on mitten number 2.

It was Saturday - two days and most of a mitten later - that I realized that I was knitting a second right-hand mitten.



Back to the drawing board. Or the start of the thumb gusset. Whichever. Either way, finishing these is my knitting goal for the weekend.

It's a Good Thing

I have a friend who dyes yarn. She's also an amazing knitter and talented designer and a generally fun and interesting person.

But this week my favorite thing about her is that she tends to bring a big pile of yarn to knit night. And I had a long tough week and when she dumped out the pile to show off her week's work (and our Club choices for next month), there was a skein that made Thursday better.



Isn't she pretty? I had to bring her home and love her and pet her and call her George. Thanks Mandie!

Setbacks

Well, here's a thing. I have this orange sweater, and after a week of furious knitting, (see last orange sweater post) I managed to get a second second sleeve that matched the first. I cast on the body and spent a week knitting little ribbed boxes. And then I tried it on.

 

That's the ease around the hem. Yeah, that's more than I wanted. Ripped some more. Current iteration of the body fits better. Now I just have to keep going.

200 Miles

I walked my 200th mile on Sunday. It was the tail bit of a kind of epic week, I walked 17.8 miles over seven days.

It's starting to get really chilly. Wednesday morning last week it was 37. I did fine with a couple layers of sleeve and fingerless gloves. It's better when I do some light stretching to start - which I should have been doing all along, but better late than never, right? (Have I mentioned I grew up in Alabama? I do ok till about 45, but below that it's really too cold.)

I still don't have a full-winter plan, although the weather people are forecasting snow flurries later this week. I'm paying way more attention to the weather people than I used to, as well.

I meant this post to be a little more than "yay, 40% in! Dude, it's getting cold!" but that's all I've got in me tonight. 300 miles and about 200 days to go.