Well, that didn't work

So, remember last Friday, when I dragged all my WIPs out of my knitting bag and posted them here in the hopes of finishing some of them?

Nope, didn't work.

So here's two new things! A third dishcloth:


I love this stitch pattern, I totally ganked it from Mandie, (ravelry link) who made it up one night at knit night. It's totally fun and awesome. The yarn was a random "need yarn" ball that I grabbed during a chance trip to wal-mart, and the orange in it goes with the other two orange dishcloths, so I think the three are going to go together out to Kid Brother soonish. Of course they'll all need ends woven soon enough. :)

And then! I was rooting through the cotton stash bag and came across a bunch of lime green cotton - bought in the same way as the multicolor above - but long enough ago that I didn't knit yet. There's more yellow in the green than is showing in this picture, the yarn is Lily Elite Cotton in Spearmint. I think I tried to crochet it into something once and then quit. But anyway, here's what's happened to it since Saturday:



The pattern is the ubiquitous Everlasting Bagstopper, and once I got through the bottom, it's love. Super-easy mesh pattern, it grows pretty fast, (although I'm getting to the "I need a marker to move up" black hole part) and somehow it's a comforting knit. I want to use it soon.

It's like a clown car in there.

Despite today's grayness, I have been meaning to photograph and blog some stuff for a while (note last post), and just hadn't gotten there. The blocking growth pictures of the pink shawl are locked away in the husband's pc, so I'll get a new picture of that, and then there's the finished sweater and that's it, right? No more "but there's no sun!" excuses. Photos today!

Pink Wrap:

Still in love. Need to dispatch it. Don't want to let it go.

Red Sweater:

This turned out well. It's my new favorite thing.

Of course then there's the rest of the stuff in The Bag. The Quinn Bag hasn't changed much since the last photo and the two socks in progress are second socks, so they're boring. But hey, there's knucks:


Yummy yummy hempwol.

There's dishcloths:

Mason-Dixon dishcloth and one from Designer One-Skein Wonders.

There's the helmetliner I started last week at the State Museum:

I'll probably mostly just work on it when I volunteer there, but it's a nifty little balaclava pattern, I dig it.

And that's just the everyday knitting bag. There's a lace scarf that sits by my chair and thus totally didn't get inventoried by the camera, and the crocheted pillow that has a back barely begun - living in a different bag with all the colors of acrylic in which I am knitting it.

Have I shown my handspun? Paige lent me her lovely Kromski Symphony a few weeks back while she went traveling. My results are below:

From left to right in order of spinning. The peachy stuff is my favorite, it was an insanely fine single that I chain-plied. I will be getting a wheel. The question is when.

And while I'm not usually a "flash my stash" kind of girl, but I went a little nuts at the Hoosier Hills Fiber Fair on Saturday, and so here is my haul. There's a good assortment of fiber types, some dyed, some not, and a lone skein of sock yarn that (in my defense) will make an awesome pair of work socks.


The beautiful greeny-blue and pink are from Creatively Dyed, as I'd been coveting her stuff since the Fiber Event in April. The sock yarn is Lotus Yarns Nirvana in "I Wanna Be Sedated" (that song gets into my head every time I look at the skein. I'm hoping the socks have the same quality.). The light blue in the plastic bag is a mill-end merino-silk mix that I totally fell for while trying out a Kromski Sonata. (I'm leaning toward a Kromski, can you tell?) I'm trying to return to my spindling for a few weeks/months/however long it takes for me to figure out what's best as far as wheel-buying goes. I should still have plenty when the wheel does come.

That's all for now. Summer is here-ish, we've had all kinds of stormy weather, and I'm leaning toward getting things finished and working mostly on smallish projects for the foreseeable future. (As in, till August. The Olympics are coming, I'm going to crochet an afghan for them, and that, my friends, will be epic.)

Things that haven't made it to picture phase yet

Finished and blocked pink wrap. It needs to also make it to the intended recipient, but meanwhile I keep reaching for it when I feel a tad chilly. LOVE it, and I probably need one just for me in a more me color. Although the bubblegum pink grew on me. (Seriously, I need to go get myself some wool for my own wrap, or that one's never getting mailed.)

Knucks out of Hempwol that I picked up in Nashville. Yummy blue yarn, happy blue gloves. Need to bind off the second, the first still needs ribbing.

Orange dishcloth for kid brother. First in a series, he may get a small collection of various patterned cloths from the same yarn. Another friend needs green dishcloths by mid-July. Dishcloths are not my favorite, but I'm feeling the itch lately.

Red sweater is a cuff and a mess of i-cord from being done. Whoo hoo.

Started a lace scarf of my own design for the grandmother I have yet to knit for. I'm thinking this may be a long-term thing, since it's pretty mindless yet still a tad fiddly.

Stalled: Quinn bag, plain dark socks, feather and fan socks.

I have new sock yarn that's begging to be cast on (Nashville is a yarny happy place - did I mention?), but I'm trying to finish my two second socks first. Summer of Socks, needless to say, isn't such a thing for me this year. Am I changing my sock-whore ways? We shall see. I think the one-piece sweater is not something to knit during the summer. Good thing mine is almost finished.

I have plans to replicate the afghan that my grandmother made my mom ages ago (and with which the Kid Brother and I grew up) in non-seventies colors. The pattern is a classic Red Heart crochet one that I came across a long time ago. I've been trying to find the appropriate palette since. I'm thinking it's going to be Christmas for the Kid Brother. (Never mind that the appropriate palette is still in the works - a Hobby Lobby trip may be in order.)

That's all I can think of, and I'm about out of evening. Need to clean the kitchen and maybe finish this dishcloth before bed.

Yeah, I'm seeing a theme to my knitting lately.



Shades of pink and red are dominating. Happens with other stuff too.



Once I finished the periwinkley stuff Paige got me started with, I pulled red coopworth (I think) out of the stash and started on it. That red bobbin is half of it. I did a second bobbin of singles and then plied them. (This is what kept me from leaving till about two hours after my original intentional departure time this morning - spinning makes time go away in a crazy way. I feel the treadling once I stand up.)

That thing you haven't seen before in the first pic? That's the Quinn cabled bag. I got the top band finished a few weeks ago and tried to graft it about half a dozen times till I finally got over it and did a three-needle bindoff. Bags are allowed seams. I'm almost over it. It's super pretty and I think I'll like it once it's done. It's definitely the beta brainwave pattern I've been looking for.



Yay. Yum.

Casting off

Ergh. Last night I got through the body of the red sweater. There was some "Long enough? No - yes - no!" drama, but eventually I got it decided and cast off however many bajillion stitches exist at the lower hem of a wrap sweater. And then I picked up near two hundred stitches for the neck band, where I'm two and a half of four rows in, and then those get bound off too. At a medium tension - as opposed to the loose one from the hem. Ergh.

I'm definitely of the opinion that casting on is better than casting off. This may be part of my top-down sock preference. I'm probably developing a bottom-up sweater preference as well.

In knitting milestones, I broke my first dpn tonight. Stepped on my sock-in-progress and snapped a 2.5mm Brittany needle. Currently thinking I'll sand the ends of the pieces and make cable needles - not that I use cable needles much lately, but it might be worthwhile nevertheless. Considering I've been knitting socks on wooden dpns for a year now, it's about time I did something dumb like that.

progress pics

Right. Those. Red Sweater:


Pink Shawl - need to update the progress bars too. Doh.

Whoo hoo!

Tuesday started (I mean the fun part started, nobody wants to know how my 8am class and later campus errands went, right?) with Mandie calling and saying "I feel like I just bought a time machine." (The reference was to Monday's Big Bang Theory, and if you ever get to the point that you realize your nerdiness is reaching new levels and maybe it's gone too far, you know the feeling...)

Fast forward a couple hours, we both figured out both what we're wearing and what we're knitting (because dude, it's early afternoon and we're in this thing till late evening, we can't risk running out!), and we headed north - because a Harlot kind of day wouldn't be complete without a stop at a yarn shop. Stitches & Scones was full of people and totally psyched. They were complimentary of my Tuscany shawl, which was kind of cool. Spent lots of time, petted lots of yarn (S&S is very good about having lots of Dream in Color and feeding my addiction in that direction), and left at a time that felt dangerously late. Seriously. It was four. She was speaking at 7. Of course, the other magic thing about S&S is that it feels like a really long way from anywhere when you're driving there, but not that far on the way back. Also the Barnes and Noble in question is basically in Westfield, but anyway.

We get there and get settled, between Tammany and Kristen, with spicyfleece Holly and a group on the other side. And wow, was that place a vortex of knitterly energy. People were talking, knitting, laughing at the staff who betrayed some iota of how freaked out they had to have been, all that. Mandie and I spent some time talking about Traveling Salesman problems, as it relates to the Harlot's tour. Good times. Signing tickets were gotten, books were prepurchased (I got three, for me, my mother-in-law, and for Paige - who had the rotten luck of having a math final the very hour that the Harlot was speaking.), and after we found food, it was about time.

She came, we did the wave. She spoke, we laughed. There were books signed and pictures taken, and man, but it was awesome.



She's an amazing person, no doubt, and I thank her for her time and energy. I came home entirely drained from just attending, I can't imagine what it's like to be at the center of that vortex.

She's posted her account of Indianapolis, and it's remarkable. I still sometimes feel like I just moved here, even though it's been twenty months now. I read her post and I realized that I recognize those people. Never mind that most of them I met that day, either at Stitches and Scones or in line, but we're all connected now. It's really cool. I'm not sure where I'd be without this yarn-obsessed community, but I am thankful for it.

(And those dinosaurs are right near where I work, isn't that cool?!?)