finding a balance

I just ripped out the Herringbone mittens I had started because a) I screwed up and misread the thumb chart and b) I decided there was too much contrast between the white and dark blue yarns. Even though I like all the finished products in black and white and other high-contrast schemes on Ravelry. For some reason mine just looked bad. Possibly partly because my gauge was a little loose and it all looked sloppy. I don't know.

I forced myself to take a knitting hiatus after finishing my Endpaper mitts to try to force myself to get some schoolwork done, on the theory that I can't type if I'm knitting. You know what I ending up doing? Nothing. I know it's a cliche to say that knitting is meditative, but I got nothing done for a whole weekend. I managed to bang out a really crappy conclusion to a paper and that's it. Then I started some mittens and all of a sudden, I was back on track. Thought up a really great activity for a lesson plan, thought of a couple of sources to use for a resource anthology, etc. It's so funny to have it brought home so literally--all the jokes we knitters make about knitting to stay sane, etc. Although isn't that the definition of dependence? That you can't get by without it?

My name is Cari, and I am knit-dependent.

dammit.

The skein of orange leftover from my Anemois, which I am using to make some Endpaper mitts, just ran out with only six rows of colorwork to go on the second mitt. I do have another skein, but was hoping to return it for store credit. Now I'll have an almost-full skein of orange sock yarn. Well, I'll figure something out. It will come in handy sometime.

I dug through the many, many boxes of books and pre-digital photos in my parents' attic yesterday and found my 1,000 Great Knitting Motifs, and am now plotting a follow-up to the Endpapers. I'm trying to decide between a pattern that looks like a wave, bunnies, or hearts. Yeah. I'm thinking if I go with the hearts, I'm just going to be super-obnoxiously girly and use red on pink, or pink on red. Depends how much pink I have left, of course, since I'm ALMOST DONE WITH MY ENDPAPERS and ran out of orange. Dammit.

ETA It's done and blocking! Wheeeeeee!

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

That visual squeal of excitement translates to: they're done, they're done, they're done! My Anemois are finished! I can't believe I knit something a) so complicated b) in such a short time--less than a month, even less if you subtract the two weeks in the middle when I didn't work on them at all c) during such a difficult semester d) without going insane.

(In case you're wondering, the answer is ALL OF THE ABOVE. I rock!)

The only problems I had were curbing my to-hell-with-the-pattern tendencies enough to make sure everything was done right, and my tension. I loosened up a lot as I got better at fair isle. The second mitten turned out MUCH bigger than the first, and floppy. You know how I hate floppy knits, so I was sad. Then I decided to try to shrink the mitten in the dryer to make it match the first, which is a little long but perfect width. This sounds like the beginning of a tale of woe, doesn't it? But it isn't!!! It actually worked! And, bonus, the mitten is now dry (hence the name "dryer") from its blocking and ready to wear when I go hiking with my friend Candice this evening! Cue Preston Myers: "It was like everything was falling into place... as if it were fate!"

Naturally, my camera battery just died, so I'll leave you with this tiny snippet of an Endpaper mitt, which I cast on for last night as soon as I broke the yarns at the tip of the second Anemoi thumb. (I am voracious for fair isle. Fair isle is my anti-drug. Ooh, that's good, I should've saved that for a post title.)

so it's just plain anemois, then?

Awww, you guys have no flava! All right then, I'll get over it and call them Anemois. I'm taking a little break from them right now though. I did the cuff of the second mitten and then decided I really need something I can knit while I read (so, not the Anemois) and something that's portable (so, not the Plain Jane raglan). No, of course I didn't make this decision while standing in a yarn store fondling delicious purple sock yarn. Why do you ask? Did Steve tell you that? Well, what kind of a rap name is Steve?

the miracle of blocking

nataliedee.com

In other news, I have finished my finals socks (although I have yet to take an FO photo), and I have cast on for a sweater. And no, I still have not finished the horrible acrylic Tomten Jacket I was making for my best friend's daughter. And no, I probably never will. And no, it's not because EZ is not a genius. It is because horrible yarn is still horrible whether or not it is free, and whether or not the recipient is a small child who wouldn't know cashmere from snotty Kleenex.

The sweater is the aforementioned copycat raglan--the Plain Jane, I'm going to call it, since I'm using no-nonsense sturdy brown Fisherman's Wool. I have to say, the FW smells fantastic. Very rustic and natural and sheep-y. It feels good, too. If you like rustic things, I mean.

And in other other news, I somehow went to the outlet mall today, during some kind of out-of-body experience (because I would never go shopping on purpose when I'm supposed to be saving money!), and bought three sweaters. THREE sweaters. And I already own upwards of twenty sweaters. And I am knitting another. And yet, sweaters.... mmmmm. I love them. I miss them all summer. Well, I don't miss the cotton ones, because I'm too busy wearing them. But I wear one nearly every day, all winter. I mean, I'm back in the northeast now. I need sweaters! Right? It's not MY fault I live near a GAP outlet. And a J Crew outlet. And Ann Taylor and Banana Republic outlets. That, despite the fact that I live about 2 miles from my work, somehow all manage to be right there, between home and work. It's clearly my parents' fault for buying this house. So when they come home (they're out of town) and they notice the addition of two more summer sweaters to the rotation (in addition to the other, warmer sweater I bought today, and oh crap... the one I bought on a whim online yesterday in a sudden hope that I might become a turtleneck person), I'll tell them. Yes, I own HOLY CRAP I JUST COUNTED THIRTY-EIGHT SWEATERS plus the online turtleneck makes thirty-nine sweet jebus I think I have a problem.

I'm going to go lie down with a cold compress over my eyes. Well, either a cold compress or my new hunter's-orange v-neck. Whatever.

bad blogger. no cookie.

Well, actually, I'm totally eating a cookie RIGHT NOW. Despite not having posted, or read anyone else's blog, for two months. My current excuse is my insane schedule: I work four days a week as a snowboard instructor (hello, dream job, my name is Cari, let's make love.), am taking twelve credits at my mom's university (not that she owns the place, just that she teaches there) toward my M.Ed., and have a ten-hour-a-week graduate assistantship at said university, working for some of my mom's lovely colleagues who totally intimidate me for two reasons: a) they are friends of my mom's and thus must not be let down, and b) they are middle-aged second-wave feminists, who may wear twee cat-motif brooches on their sweaters but are made of steel and will totally cut a bitch. (They are really nice though, and however demanding they may be, they always say thank you.) So my life is full to overflowing right now and the only thing keeping me going is the aforementioned dream job, which pays peanuts in actual hard currency but big bucks in all the intangible, meaningful ways. Naturally this means that I am getting enormous amounts of exercise and following it up with healthy doses of beer, which then takes a toll on the homework situation, which then takes a toll on the sleep situation, but I figure I can sleep when the snow melts.

Yesterday's all-day dumping made for a rare occasion in PA--actual powder. After my last lesson of the day I went free riding with a revolving assortment of fellow instructors (all of whom, well, most of whom are pretty fucking awesome) for four hours. Don't tell the rangers, but we poached some closed trails--it was the kind of indescribably great experience that makes me speak in all four-letter words because there's just nothing else strong enough. The phrase "better than sex" was tossed around. Several fucking times. Afterwards I could not stop smiling. (Well, not until I got home and had to shovel the driveway, since my dad is out of town and I dislike and distrust the snowblower.) I had to bust out the facemask, which is why you may not recognize me from the little cell-phone portrait there.

I don't have much time to knit, sadly. I'm still working on my dad's Christmas socks but I needed a break, so I started a Quant with some heinous self-striping Paton's Merino that I liked on the skein and now am hating. I'll have to get some pictures up and get some feedback, but the combination of the colors and the shortness of the stripes and the entrelac is just... no.

mystical math?

Someone found my blog by googling "mystical math." Isn't that a contradiction in terms? I mean, you can worship numbers or the Five Perfect Solids if you want, but really, math is not mystical, you are. Other recent hits include "mom foot," "cool knots tied with one hand," "Japan open container laws," "random facts about the Home Depot" (????), and my favorite, "hipster dinosaur robot."


I've encountered a little problem with my EZ saddle-shouldered sweater for Dad. That problem, for once, is not gauge. My gauge is PERFECT. What is not perfect is... my laziness. I asked my mom how big my dad's chest was, and she estimated 36" and said that a 40" sweater would be fine. It's true, he's not a big guy, but my chest is bigger than that. I should've asked her to measure (and him to pretend to forget... oh, who am I kidding, this cat is 40 miles down the road from the bag and hasn't stopped running yet), because when I finally broke down (under the desperate, consuming need to know--did I do all this stockinette for nothing?) and asked him if I could measure his chest, I came up with the horrifying, terrible number of...

42.

That is two inches LARGER than my perfectly-on-gauge(-for-once) sweater, people! I may be able to block it bigger, but how much bigger? I don't want my dad walking around looking like a sweater girl! It's got to have some ease! Why did I do this to myself? WHY?

So I've put the sweater aside for now, to be rethought later, perhaps for Father's Day '09, and started on a pair of socks with some of Scout's Illini sock yarn (click on it, her photos are much better than mine!). I bought it ages ago, with my dad in mind (he and my mom met at the University of Illinois, 40 years ago this week, actually), but hadn't used it because based on what I've seen in the laundry room, all of his current socks appear to be black or dark brown. This may be an interesting experiment: will my dad actually wear anything I knit for him?





p.s. I got MAIL today: a care package from my best friend! Which she meant to send me while I was still in Japan, but hey! Snail mail is love, whenever it arrives! Included was Craft magazine, cover story Japan Style. Awww. I also got a ton of actual, frameable, non-jpg photographs and some candy corn. Which is already gone, unfortunately, or it would've made a nice addition to my very orangey photo. Check out her new baby decked out in his care-package-from-Japan bib, you guys!

tradition, hoooo!

My Thanksgiving was pretty great. It involved my grandmother, aunt, uncle, and three cousins as well as ye olde nuclear family; my grandmother told us the story of how she and my grandfather met (the long version... again...), and my uncle and the boy cousin showed us all how you can make an awesome soda-pop volcano with Diet Coke and Mentos (seriously, try it--our best one shot up 7 feet!), and I introduced the whole family to Japanese television personality Hard Gay. The last of which resulted in our gathering around my uncle's laptop watching youtube clips for over an hour and then ending all of our sentences with "HOOOOOO!" for probably another hour. I really hope that becomes a tradition.

An already-established tradition is that of me starting my Christmas knitting in July or August, going like gangbusters, and then stopping for some reason and waking up mid-November realizing how little time I have left. This year it's a sweater for my father, an Elizabeth Zimmerman saddle-shoulder in Cascade 220, sort of a slate-grey color. And this year's reason for stopping was the aforementioned disaster. For almost two months before I left Japan, we were pretty sure that the end was near, but hoped that it wasn't. Our mid-September paychecks were late, and I just gave up, because I didn't want to knit the fear and indecision and general negativity into my father's sweater. Well, really, I was too depressed to have the energy to keep working on it. So I have barely touched it in almost two months, and it's just this torso-tube, and I can't find more than two size 7 dpns to start a sleeve, and I braved the Christmas-shopper traffic today to go buy some with my dwindling funds, and the craft store didn't have any. I mean, come on! Are they unaware that I've just been through an international unemployment incident? Do they know it's Christmastime at all? Won't somebody please think of the children?

So I've rooted around and somehow come up with a couple of fives and a couple of sixes, and I'm going to cast on with those and see if they'll get me through the ribbing, after which I can switch to a hat-sized circ.

Hope your Thanksgivings were as full of joy, food, sugar explosions, and hip-thrusting as mine was.

unintentional keyhole neck

unintentional keyhole neck
Originally uploaded by safety dance.

I don't think I've blogged about this project at all, although I did work on it my last night at ABQ SNB (sob). I saw that Andean Silk Twist was on sale (apparently because it's being discontinued) a few months ago, 1 ball for $1.99, so I ordered some. I wasn't sure I liked when I got it, but I dove in and started knitting. Well, I'm still not sure I like it, but here it is. Self-designed almost-an-FO, colorway sunset, which looks gorgeous close-up, but which from far away is just a muddle. (This is probably why Andean Silk Twist is being discontinued--the colorways were, um, not great. Good idea in theory, though. Maybe they'll come up with some new Twists!)

I've blocked the crap outta this mofo and still, when I pin it to mimic how I want the buttons to go, it's all gappy! So I'm going to leave it like this, find a really cool button or pin to put right at the top and a dark blue cami to wear underneath, and call it a keyhole neck. Totally on-purpose design element! Totally!

CPHoenix: ashes reconstructed

The Central Park Hoodie is dead. Long live the Phoenix!

When I finished this sweater in February and tried it on, I was crushed to find that through some mysterious quirk of gauge it was both too short and too tight. One or the other might be bearable, or both if it were 100% natural fiber. But I used Woolease, so obviously blocking it larger wasn't a solution. Fortunately for me, rather than rip this yarn from its second sweaterly incarnation, I have a shorter, slimmer sister to whom I owe a sweater (see Skully, Christmas '05).

It's somewhat self-designed, as in, I took someone else's shaping and sizing and modified it heavily. This is based on my old friend, the Hourglass Sweater from LMKG, with embossed twining leaf leace from Vogue Knitting on the sleeves. I added ribbing with baby cables to the hem and just plain ribbing (because baby cables are too fussy to keep making) to the neckline, which if I'm totally honest I think is too big, but I actually really like with a t-shirt, tank, or button-down underneath.

I used the embossed twining vine leaf lace pattern from Vogue Knitting. I also originally wanted to make the raglan lines stand out, but couldn't figure out how to do it; I wanted the appearance of a seam, to make the stockinette body and reverse-stockinette sleeves look like they'd been sewn together from other sweaters. But I like the little purl channel I made instead. Instead of decreasing ssk, k1, k2tg, I did ssk, p1, k2tog. I'll definitely be using that again.

Now to go outside and enjoy the last sunshine before this 20-year storm they're predicting...

Huh? The circus is where?

Finally finished my circus-freak jays.

Pattern: Grumperina's Jaywalkers, of course

Yarn: Regia Something. I've lost the ball band. Whatever this stuff is, though, it's awfully splitty. I won't be using it again. If, uh, I can remember what it is before I buy it.

Mods: Made them shorty-socks because I felt lazy. Only 2 or 3 inches above the heel instead of 7.

Started/Completed: March 2006/April 2007. The longest-running UFO I had. And I finished it! Now I'm going to tackle my Picovoli.

feeling scottish

That's what my dad called it, and we can say that because we are Scottish. Well, part. I'm queasy because I just spent a ridiculous (for me) amount of money. I just ordered a new laptop, or notebook, as the kids are apparently callin' 'em these days, and because I'm going to use it to replace my desktop entirely I dropped a pretty solid chunk of change. I know it's (probably) worth what I'm paying, but I don't have it in my hands yet and can't play with it and haven't even tested the keyboard. So I feel like I basically just threw my money away. Ugh, I hate spending money. My dad's more-sympathetic-than-its-sounds response? "Wait 'til you buy a house."

I'm going to try to stop thinking about it now. The whole time I was clicking around the internet checking out notebooks (look, I can be taught!), I was working on a new project: an entrelac (look, I can be taught!) scarf. I'm really frustrated with the Phoenix (nee Central Park Hoodie) because I apparently stretched it out while measuring and it is at least two inches too short, hem-to-armpit, for me. It's also too tight, and since it's Wool-ease I don't know if I can block it big enough to be comfortable. I'm not a fan of short or tight, and definitely not short AND tight. So while I decide whether I want to try to undo the cast-on edge and knit down, or just give it to my slimmer, shorter little sister, I've started Knitty's Danica for my older sister's birthday. I'm fairly sure she doesn't read this, so I'm safe posting it here. Besides which, this may not be its final incarnation yet. I hate skinny scarves, I prefer fat, wide, almost-a-shawl scarves, so this just isn't enough scarf; I don't like scarves that have a wrong side, so I'm either going to have to line it (ugh) or rip it and knit it as a tube; I may have to buy more yarn, I may turn it into a Clapotis out of sheer laziness, etc.

I really am enjoying the entrelac though, and the Patons SWS I'm using is surprisingly lush and soft for yarn that came from Michaels. And when my laptop gets here, I can fashion it some fun plug-in devices like these. I saw someone on craftster make one out of a $1 bathtub toy from Target and some carefully-applied superglue.