Just Another Random Monday

My brain is feeling scattered today, so I think it’s time for a random post.

1. The weather has finally gotten warm! I’ve planted my garden and have spent a couple of happy hours outside today watering and pruning.
2. That Cat caught another poor bird today.
3. It’s laundry day. Again. How can they generate this much laundry in 3 days???
4. Because the weather has turned lovely, it is now officially barbecue season at Chez Greenethumb. I. Love. This.
5. I’ve almost completed a DYO cabled sock. (Yes, I started it in March. It had to be set aside for various reasons.)  I’m rather pleased with how it is turning out.
6. My daughter asked my husband to take her to the store on Saturday to buy me a Mother’s Day gift. She used her own money to buy me a new pizza cutter. I find this utterly charming.
7. College Grad son called me to wish me happy Mother’s Day. From his room. In our house.
8. Lately, my children’s favorite Sunday afternoon past time is to play “cricket” in the back yard. It…well, it resembles the real game, but they have tweaked the rules. They all speak in horrible British accents and have adopted their favorite British names, which are: Milton, Archibald Benedict, Percy Reginald, and Beatrice.
9. Yesterday, they varied it by playing duct-tape baseball golf.  Yeah, I don’t get the rules either.
10. I bought some alpaca batts to play with on my spindle during Tour de Fleece. I haven’t spun too much yet, and it’s all been wool to this point. This fiber is STUNNING. And so soft!!
11. Geek Boy (youngest son) informed me yesterday that he’s planning to go to the Junior-Senior Banquet. This is his school’s equivalent of “The Prom”. AND he’s going to ask a girl. This will be his first official date.  He and his friends tend to hang out in big groups, which I think is much healthier. Even for the banquet, he’ll be going with a group of friends, but he’s taking a girl.  I enjoy watching my kids grow up, but I still find this a bit bittersweet.
12. I just might paint my daughter’s bedroom this week. If she can clean it up enough first!

I think that’s enough for today. I need to take pictures of the recent knitting (and the fiber I just got), and then I’ll have a little knitting show and tell later this week.

 

 

April Update

Okay. It’s still possible for me to finish my April knitting, at least I think so.  Or maybe I’m completely out of touch with reality. It’s a toss up.

What’s finished?

The sweater, for one thing. I need to block it, but the knitting is done and all of the ends are woven in. And in an even more shocking twist of events, it fits! The yarn is itchy, but hopefully it will soften up when I wash it, and in any case I will probably wear a shirt under it.

The socks that needed heels are finished.  These will end up going to my sister. She’s had a pretty rough spring, and although I had intended to send them to her in the fall for her birthday, I think I’ll send them sooner. Even if it’s starting to be too warm for wool socks, it will cheer her up.

I started to knit the fingerless gloves, but the colors of the yarn I wanted to use were not quite right, so I scrapped that plan for the moment. It’s a cool pattern, though, so I’ll look around for different yarn and try these later.

I finished the first green sock and cast on the second sock. It would probably be a quick knit, except the sock construction is not familiar to me. I’ve knit toe-up socks before, but they have all had gusset increases before turning the heel OR they had short-row heels.  This pair has a heel flap that goes under the heel.  It’s knit just like a top down only backwards. Not tricky, but it feels wrong.  It’s also entirely possible that I am bored with this pattern. It probably would be best if I powered through and finished it quickly. Sigh.

The blue cabled socks? I haven’t touched those since the last picture.

Summary: Basically two and a half socks to go to finish. In 5 1/2 days.  Hmmm….

More Than I Can Chew

Clearly, I’m delusional.

I’m a fairly quick knitter. Or maybe I just knit a lot of the time. In either case, I do tend to make a lot of things in a decent amount of time. This may be going to my head.

Here’s what I want to finish by the end of April:

A sweater. The body is finished, and it’s knit from Cascade Eco-Wool at a fairly large gauge. Totally do-able.

A pair of socks. Now, this is a terrible picture. The yarn for these socks came from the Unique Sheep and is one of their Gradience colorways. It is BEAUTIFUL in real life, not so much in the photo. I’m still on the first sock, although I’m nearing the end, maybe four inches to go on the leg.  (I know. It’s a toe-up sock. I don’t like knitting toe-up socks. I like the pattern, and I do not wish to be any stodgier and set in my ways than I am, though, so I’m knitting this way).

Another pair of socks. This is a pattern I’m working on of my own. I just turned the heel of the first sock, and am starting down the gusset.

ANOTHER pair of socks. These are plain socks, and because of the self-striping nature of this yarn, I decided to try an after-thought heel on them. I’m hoping to get something of a bulls-eye effect. Both socks are done (other than Kitchenering one toe shut), and all I need to do is knit the heels.

By themselves, each of these projects could be done by the end of April. Together??? That’s nearly 3 full socks, 2 sleeves, 2 heels. Oh, yes. I’d also like to make a pair of fingerless gloves. Hey! They would be knit from worsted weight!

Like I said, clearly I’m delusional.

The problem is that I’m competitive. All of these projects are either for Nerd Wars or another knit-along, and they are all wrapping up at the end of the month. I want to finish them all!

Stay tuned to see whether or not I make it!

The Rumpus is Over

I finished my socks.  I love them desperately.

Now on to one of the other eighty-five works in progress…

Wild Rumpus Socks

A little while ago, a friend of mine and I were joking around about causing a rumpus, and of course we then started talking about the book “Where the Wild Things Are”.  (I won’t digress now, but one day I will climb on my soap box and talk about how much I love children’s books and reading to kids).

Anyway, knowing how much I am obsessed with knitting socks, she challenged me to design some socks based on the book. As I thought about it, I decided the best way to interpret it would be in color work. My brain started churning, and I came up with some ideas.

Now the other side of the coin is that, to be frank, I have a lot of yarn. I really, really don’t need to buy more. And it just so happens that I had a bunch of Knit Picks Palette in my stash in the proper colors. I’m a little nervous about using this yarn for socks, because I’m unconvinced that it will hold up well. But I’m keeping them for myself so I know they will be properly washed, and I think I will save these for special occasions.

And I LOVE them.

“And now,” cried Max, “let the wild rumpus start!”

 

“The wild things roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws…”

More Knitting! In Less Than A Week!

Actually, I’m going to show off a couple of things I knit last month but haven’t posted yet.

Once again, I’m involved in Nerd Wars, and once again I’m playing on Team Precious. It’s surprising how many things you can tie in to Lord of the Rings. We have some excellent “Shoehorners” on our team that can pretty much take any project and figure out a way to tie it in.  This is important because you get extra points for that, and really…We’re Competitive.

One of the March challenges was to be inspired by the paintings of Gustav Klimt.  Many of his paintings seem to have tiny squares and rectangles in them, so I knit these mitts:

I’m still having trouble recovering/convincing my son to help me put all of my pictures and documents back on the computer, so I don’t have pictures of all of the projects I did last month available.  (Wow. Run on sentence. Time for coffee, I think).   But I did find a picture of a pair of socks I knit that I LOVE. Not fancy yarn, just Patons Kroy, but the pattern was easy, and interesting enough to show off the yarn nicely.

I’m even more smitten with them because they don’t match.

Currently, I’m working on a hat for a little girl with leukemia and a pair of socks that I’m designing and are based on the book “Where The Wild Things Are”. Oh yeah. I love these.

Been too long, but new knitting content!

In spite of rather non-existent blogging, I have been knitting quite a bit lately.  Time for show and tell!

First of all, I just finished a toddler sweater this morning that I adore.  I clearly need more small people in my life to knit for right now.

…five minute delay…

Well, crud. I was going to show a bunch of other stuff I’ve knit lately, including a couple of pairs of fingerless gloves and several pairs of socks, but we recently re-formatted our computer and apparently all of my pictures haven’t been put back on. No, they aren’t lost forever, but I need Geek Boy to come home and help me recover them. Phooey. I thoroughly dislike being a non-techie.  Every time I ask someone for help, they just DO what I want done without SHOWING me how to do it. Don’t they realize that if they show me, they won’t have to constantly help?

I can show you one more thing, though, and that is a scarf I knit out of my own handspun. I’ve only made two or three actual yarns to date. All I have to say is Oh My. This scarf is so squishy and soft. I. Love. It.