katie’s knit etc.

self-patterning/striping yarn is creepy, but i ended up with a ball of it and before i knew what was happening, i had socks. most of the first sock was knit in the car on the way to and from minneapolis in early october, and the second was done on my couch and in the car driving back and forth from lawrence several times recently, and then finished while i laid on the couch on a sick day i took from work to fight off cold #2 (two already this autumn/winter seems UNFAIR).

the best part of today was spent wandering through river market antiques, just two blocks from home. here is the most delightful salt & pepper shakers i’ve ever seen:

must post: pictures of the yellow bamboo scarf, finally post pictures & thoughts on my somewhat cowl; in-progress pictures of the scarves i’m knitting for chris & me, and the socks i’m going to start at any moment for my father as a christmas gift.

meanwhile, here is a reminder of summer and an in-progress picture of the somewhat cowl. the knitting is done but the cowl neck needed to be tacked down and ends woven in, and it deserved a break. it (and i) lounged happily at the beach in north carolina.

i am hereby promising to update this blog. a great deal of knitting and knit-planning has gone down the last several months and none of it is documented - and i doubt some of it will happen if i don’t commit to it on the internets. i’m on the upswing from a terrible cold that hit in earnest sunday and monday, but began it’s creep into my nose on saturday - just in time to be a zonked out space cadet when i met ana (formerly of my building, fellow nc-goer this summer, and i believe you also lived in chicago??) at the crafty girls sale in liberty this weekend. (does anyone still read this blog? go buy her stuff on etsy.)

at any rate, i’m more or less alive and well. chris’s arm is healed but his job-hunt remains ongoing. i have a ton of yarn. i have a ton of fabric. both are going to be made into things, hopefully sooner rather than later. i’ve finished at least several things, including socks (my first foray into self-patterning yarn - creepy) that were declared finished yesterday and photographed while i laid on the couch blowing my nose and watching art school confidential.

more later. time to watch the news for election returns!

i still haven’t posted since my vacation, despite having plenty of news and pictures and going to really great fabric and yarn stores in asheville, nc.  chris and i found a great new apartment right before we left on vacation, and as soon as we got back we started getting organized and packed to move - especially during the past week.  we’re close to being ready to move into the new place this weekend, and then…

chris and his sister were over at the new place, taping things up to get ready to paint.  and he fell off a ladder.  and he was taping up near the top of our 13′ ceilings.  luckily all that happened was a terrible wrist break - but of course, it’s still a terrible wrist break.  he spent six hours yesterday in the emergency room, most of it in traction, trying to get things back in order.  then he was sent home in a temporary cast with an appointment for surgery to further re-align and put pins in everything.  that’s tomorrow morning.  we move sunday.

updates, for real, after all of this plays out.

(apparently i hit SAVE and not PUBLISH on this post several weeks ago - i wrote it before i left on my vacation, on july 6.  oops.)
nothing in the world will make me a diligent or inspired blogger, but i stupidly keep trying. i’ve nearly finished the somewhat cowl several times now - ripped out my original bind-off because it was too snug and tried again with a larger needle - it seemed perfect; then ripped back many inches because the neckline was too low; revamped it, knit it down to the bottom of the ribbing again, and thought i had a perfect bind-off. but then! i picked up the stitches around the neck and did the cowl ribbing, and it’s fabulous, and tried it on again - and the damn thing was not only too snug, but it definitely was too short after all that other business had been taken care of. so i ripped it back to the top of the bottom ribbing again, added two inches and three more rounds of increases, and am currently deep into the ribbing.

THIS WILL BE FINISHED THIS WEEKEND. except it will likely be finished in the car, or in a motel room, as chris is now back from amsterdam for good and we are HITTING THE ROAD - we’re driving to the north carolina coast to spend too-few days on the beach. this vacation was planned in a fit of rage at having had to work on my days off for five straight months because my workplace kept refusing to hire me any help. my position at that point was “screw you all, i’m going to the beach, and if you don’t have anyone here then GOOD LUCK,” so i called my favorite little hotel in all of north carolina, and they had three nights available, and i said BOOK ‘EM.

we’ll be gone friday-friday and i will take lots of knitting pictures during or after and hopefuly have plenty to say after i’ve had a chance to relax.

i always start to feel a little guilty about being such a poor updater, but then i remind myself that the real reason i started doing this was to create and organizational space for myself so i’d stop forgetting what my plans were and stop forgetting what i was working on, and a good excuse to take pictures of and note on everything.

it turns out the embossed leaves socks are the fastest socks, evar, as far as i’m concerned. i finished them a few days ago after taking about a week off - why was i worried that i wouldn’t finish them in time to gift them to my grandma on mother’s day? they are complete well ahead of schedule.

what i have learned from this project: who needs yoga? trying to photograph my own feet has made me just as creatively bendy as the best yoga class possibly could.

yesterday was spent at my grandparents’ house, around the corner from my mother. they have recently purchased a new house and will be moving in at the beginning of may, but have yet to put their house on the market - the house they have lived in for 33 years. the cleanliness and order of their house belies the fact that they are both major packrats, and the children of major packrats who simply took on the majority of their parents stuffed when those folks passed away. it was my responsibility to begin the process of convincing my grandmother to at least box up, if not give away, some of her 1000+ cookbooks. she has cookbooks that belonged to her mother, cookbooks given to her at her wedding, and used to buy a cookbook anywhere they went on their travels. a high point: along the way i found 31 year old coupons for eggo waffles and hawaiian punch mix tucked in as bookmarks.

projects today have included watching legally blonde (it is good!) and potting some baby plant starts that my mother gave me last night. i also stood and stared at the giant wood frames i bought at work last summer (i work in an art museum; they had a “garage sale” last year in order to clear out excess/old inventory from the museum store). evidence of both:

work on the somewhat cowl from knit & tonic has gone along incredibly quickly. blue sky alpaca silk is incredible - while i have sworn to make this sweater fit perfectly, should some disaster befall me i think i will be just as happy to wrap myself in the yarn and stay in bed all day. just a few more inches until i’m done with the raglan yoke and can join the sides.

i should really be baking cupcakes right now instead of posting plush bunny pictures to the internets.

nearly a month ago now i flew to nyc with my mother. our primary objective was to see the silver jews play at webster hall, with the secondary objective being to see people: namely, my delightful pal & former roommate andrew, as well as the adorable fat baby cousin mentioned in my previous post [and his (less fat) parents (who are adorable, don’t get me wrong)]. my tertiary objective, then, was to locate habu textiles and spend too much money. which i did! though the presence of both my mother and andrew put a damper on my spending for which i am very grateful. i absolutely could have continued to crawl around on the floor, picking out balls for another armload (or two) if i hadn’t felt a little ashamed by my audience (though i know the two of them had a very fine time as well).

i ended up buy over a dozen odd balls (most of which are pictured above) of various colors, weights, and fibers - bamboo, silk, cotton, and paper, primarily. some wools. mostly very thin yarns. no idea what i’m going to do with these yet - simply knit up some swatches and make a patchwork of them so i can just keep ogling these amazing yarns?

goal for 2006: create a garment with which i’m 99% satisifed, and that i am willing to wear in public

averaged out, i am 65% satisfied with my last two projects. in descending order, they are:

this is my kate, from the jess hutchison pattern in the winter 05 knitty (90% satisfied). i love this little dumpling, and she was a much quicker knit than i’d anticipated. what i learned from this project: i’m an utterly inept embroiderer. what i’m grateful for: this kitten was for my (not quite) year-old fat baby cousin satchel, and i saw from his reception of the kitten that he is is either undiscerning or unconcerned with such skills. i can’t wait to make more jess hutch toys for more people!then, there was my gored skirt from the winter 05 interweave knits (mag pic) (40% satisfied):
this is in peruvian collection sierra aran from elann.com, in the color paprika. the yarn is incredibly soft for the very low price, and i’m wild about the color. about halfway through the broad swathes of straight knitting, however, i started to get the niggling fear that my hips are just definitely not built for knitwear. but i soldiered onward… seaming all the seams, weaving in the dozens of ends, and tried it on - to discover that my hips are indeed not cut out for knitwear. now what? i’m very happy with the skirt itself, but it’s simply impossible for me to wear. am i up for the challenge of digging out all those ends to rip it out and reuse the yarn? probably not, if i’m being realistic. now what?

is anyone still out there? here’s what i learned this past fall: it’s a bad idea to keep your passwords cached on your computer, because when your hard drive fails irretrievably, and your blog admin password was a wordpress-generated random string of letters and numbers, and then you somehow can’t remember the email address you’d used as your login in the first place … it doesn’t leave a lot of options for retrieving that password. then you undergo 6+ months of spam blog comments flooding your inbox with no way to stop them.

last week i finally sleuthed out the email address i’d set up for blog admin purposes, only to find out that the version of wordpress i had installed had a broken password-reminder system and i would need to upgrade. this afternoon, in my first lull at work in over a month, i had a moment to do so … and did. if you happen to look at this RIGHT NOW, it turns out i have some repair work to do. i’ll get to that soon.

when that’s done maybe i’ll even get around to posting knitting content. i’ve done plenty the last few months, some successful and some not at all, and i also visited habu textiles when i was in nyc a few weeks ago and spent too much (but less than i expected) on lots of delightful little odd balls that i have no real plan for yet. so far i just like to look at them.

back to work.

there are a number of reasons i have so fully neglected this blog for the last … long while.

1) my login for it was one of those browser-remembered passwords that i’d let go from my memory. a reformat on my old machine, and then a new machine, resulted in the erasure of that login/pw combo from my browser and then weeks of wondering where i’d saved that info. in both cases, after several weeks, i finally found them recorded in a .txt file in a very peculiar place. rather than saving them somewhere more obvious after the first incident, i left them where they were. as such, the second time around took nearly as long.

2) i just haven’t been knitting much… through all of 2005. this isn’t to say that i don’t have a dozen plans and a plentiful stash that i hope to dive into within the next few weeks — but there just hasn’t been much to report. i think the only truly completed project this far is a knit necktie for my dear chris. i do have pictures of this which i will post asap (i am at work right now). in response to a question ana asked in a reply to one of my posts - the knitting on that cabled bag is done. however, my blocking rendered it too open & weak to use as-is, so i’m going to try to come up with a decent lining to make it usable. my poor grandmother has been waiting for six months (?) now for this.

3) internet ennui.

4) in furtherance to #2, i’ve just been tired and lazy and moody for awhile now. this began with the bookstore job that entailed truly miserable hours, which thankfully lasted only a few months. i’m currently working at the great big art museum here in town, maybe more on that later. in theory i really love this job, all of it - in practice, i really love some of it, but am underutilized & have had too much idle time through the summer. hopefully that will end as fall gets cranking. plus i’ve been in and out of town much of the summer. i was in nyc visiting two very favorite friends with chris for four days, and then the following weekend chris & i drove to chicago to visit other friends, and so that i could moan about how much i miss living there. we then drove south to bloomington/normal to visit more friends than i care to count in what is undoubtedly the most documented (photo & video) barbecue ever. i just got back yesterday from a trip to syracuse, for a multi-purpose family event (purposes including my grandparents’ 50th anniversary and a brand new baby cousin).

there are a number of reasons posting here should pick up rather soon.

1) chris is moving to amsterdam, leaving me with an enormous amount of time that has been, for the last few months, devoted to him.

2) the weather will be cooling off, and i’m a much happier knitter with a lap full of yarns when it is <75 degrees out, vs. >90 degrees.

3) stash guilt.

i smell of mown grass.

my project for april is to get myself organized mentally & otherwise to actually get some projects finished.

first among these is the cabled purse that you can see a picture of here, on the urban arts & crafts homepage. i’m knitting this for my grandma out of queensland collection’s kathmandu aran, in color #113 which is a rich brown with flecks of red and gold and lighter brown throughout. we saw a completed bag hanging in the store a few months back, and my grandma decided she must have it. i improvised it at first but wasn’t ever totally happy with it, and the dimensions seemed off, so it’s been languishing in my basket for too long now. i was back down at the store about two weeks ago though, in search of buttons, and realized they had the printed pattern for the bag available… so i dropped the $2, and i’m getting set to rip out what i’d done in order to restart.

the yarn shop & more in overland park is having a 25% off everything sale this weekend, and i dropped by early this afternoon. goal #1 was finding some plain cotton in the right colors with which to knit a necktie for my friend chris. goal #2 was finding something with which to knit a pinwheel blanket for my impending baby cousin. i found some perfect, gorgeous stuff for it … then decided it was too gorgeous to part with, and too gorgeous for a baby to puke on, but mainly the colors were too perfect for me, so i’m probably going to make it and keep it. … and find something else for mr. baby.

what i’m happiest about, though, is that i finally bought the trendsetters segue in the colorway that i’m nuts about. i’ve been eyeing this stuff at multiple shops for nearly as long as i’ve been knitting. here it is (click for a larger one):

i really do intend to post updates with pictures and everything, i do i do. meanwhile i’ve finished knitting a new pair of fuzzyfeet to replace the ones that i wore out (it took a year, almost exactly, to wear through them) and this afternoon i will probably go ahead and felt them.

what else am i up to? oh that dumb ballet pullover. i’m just not sure what to do with that. it’s clearly going to look less than ideal on, so i should probably just rip it out, too, and use the rowan cork for something else. i haven’t touched it in months and it’s just taking up space now.

and the birch shawl, that’s done except for weaving in ends. it’s dense and warm and fluffy and kind of ridiculous, but i kind of adore it.

i’ve been very much not-knitting since christmas - i got a little burned out with all the last minute little projects, and i’d just started a new job (which i’m hating) (and which has me very very tired all the time) so i haven’t had the energy to even think about knitting in the evenings. i’m going to bed super early and mostly just laying around wishing i was in bed already when i’m not actually asleep.

christmas means insane last minute knitting. i woke up at 7 am to finish a pair of wristwarmers for my aunt w. just finished them! heading over to the grandparents’ for xmas merriment in a half hour.

well, except the ends to weave in. but still!

(here are links to earlier madli pictures: in progress, knitting finished)

i finally pinned out my madli for blocking tonight! i finished knitting on her back in september but i kept not blocking due to small distractions & who knows why, even though it was clear that i was destined to have a great love affair with her … was i afraid of commitment!?

at any rate tonight madli was blocked out on a 4′x4′ piece of foam board that was stashed away in my mother’s garage. madli is longer than that so i stretched the rest over the top of the foam and pinned her down on the opposite side. she then got a good soaking from a spray bottle and is standing up in the bathtub until tomorrow morning.

the problem with blocking is that stretching her out & studying the whole length of madli forced me to see where i’d screwed up. it’s safe to say, though, that no one will notice the errors when she’s being worn, and if that’s the worst thing that happened in my first lace project … well, fine.

there are probably dozens of possible definitions for ‘yarning’ and i suspect i’ll never employ the word aside from right now,

but today i made a trip to yarn shop & more in overland park, ks., about 30 minutes away. lately it’s my favorite local yarn store - plenty of space to move around and see what’s available without getting into shoving matches with other shoppers, and the owners/staff are friendly and helpful and chatty without being too intrusive or annoying or at all condescending. i didn’t buy anything too super fabulous (nor can i, after six months of unemployment) but i’m happy with it, and it was very affordable!

	this is some plain old lambs pride worsted. one of my much beloved fuzzy feet developed a huge hole last week and it’s time to make a replacement pair to wear through 2005 (pair #1 lasted from dec ‘03-dec ‘04).  this color is “aubergine” - a very deep browny purple.
	this is cascade yarn’s bulky leisure - my first run-in with it.  the label says 50% pima cotton, 50% superfine alpaca.  this stuff feels fantastic - very soft without being hairy, and strong but still warm and cozy.  these are going to be knit up as soon as possible into some sort of wristwarmers as a gift to a friend with cold hands, whose birthday is coming up next week.  i hope this feels as great knit up as it did in the hank.
	and this is cascade 220 in a color that didn’t photograph well - a very deep mushroomy brown/grey.  since the broadstreet attempt didn’t work out so well as a gift for my dad, i’m going to try something similar with this, hopefully in plenty of time for christmas.

also! i took this picture of some reynolds cabana that i picked up a while back for some wristwarmers for my aunt w. (these are the quick & useable gift for lots of people this year):

the picture reminds me of the ads for zoloft with the sad little anxiety-ridden blob wobbling about, then becoming visibly happier after (presumably) chowing on some pills. (their website features a little animation of the blob.) i have spent the evening picturing that green ball of cotton/acrylic wobbling about, being a wallflower at parties and retreating to a cave rather than enjoying a sunny & sociable day playing with a ladybug.

last night the christmas tree was assembled:

and i also found this book in a basket under some magazines. can’t remember where it came from but i really need to flip through it:

i really need to become a little more … disciplined? or less fervent? or just chill out is maybe the easiest way to say it. i need to plan better. it’s too much fun to blow through all the funny little stitches and see a huge pattern develop.

on ebay early this year i bought four balls of rowan’s discontinued kid soft yarn (35% merino/40% mohair/25% nylon) - floofy like mohair, soft like merino, sutrdy like nylon. no idea what i wanted to do with it but it was dirt cheap & the very soft blue seemed calming. last week it suddenly seemed imperative that i use it to make birch from rowan #34, which actually recommends their kidsilk haze. whatever.

anyway i plowed through it at an absurd speed, motivated by how soft and cozy it felt, and how cold the house is, but also by the realization that i’d be short a few balls of yarn and it was too late to resize. balls of kidsoft are about half the yardage of balls of kidsilk … and i wanted to know as soon as possible how far my four balls would get. luckily the ebay seller i bought the stuff from, back in early spring, still had a ton of it up and i ordered three more balls, which should be more than enough (& hopefully will arrive very very soon!). there are a handful of places i’ve found errors that will be glaring to me when it’s done, and one that will require some clever weaving in of another stretch of yarn to secure things. there’s just no way i was going to frog back mohair that far.

so yes. the kidsoft makes for a much thicker, denser fabric - but that sure sounds great for the cold days and nights right now. here are two pictures of my birch, and a picture for comparison of the lighty, airy shawl in the book:

my drive to learn to knit in the first place was born of burning desire to knit socks, a desire of unknown origins. (unknown aside from always liking socks, and wanting more socks.) so probably it shouldn’t suprise me that i’ve ended up with lots of small projects. i love knitting socks, though haven’t done many, but can’t wait to do more. a lot of the small projects happen because i really enjoy doing things for friends & family - but don’t have the resources, and until this summer didn’t have the time, to indulge in larger projects for them. i’m also hypersensitive to small errors that i make in my knitting, and it’s a lot easier to fix or hide an error in something that’s small or not reliant on fit to make it useable.

anyway.

one person i’ve never knit something for is my dad. i couldn’t think of anything appropriate - silly, though, because he’d be happy to have pretty much anything, i’m sure. at some point i decided to work up the broadstreet mitten/gloves from knitty for him - something i was sure he’d like, and i had stash yarn that would be perfect for them. unfortunately, i knit up the first one and it fit my hand just right, a little snug but warm. which means it’d be just too small to be comfortable for him. nuts. i’ve got a tiny bit of finishing work left to do on the first one, but it looks like they belong to me now: