New FO!

Posted on by

Remember that idea I had about the arm/hand -warmers with the sheep on them?

585

They’re finished! No, I’m not some jedi-knitter (though I’m sure a total of zero of anyone reading this actually thought that), but I think it’d be cool. Nah, I just haven’t posted in awhile and managed to plow through the two of them in about two days. Did the ribbed bottom portion one night, the rest and the sheep the next day, along with the ribbed portion of the second one that night, and the rest plus the sheep the next day. Confusing enough for you?

They’re totally cute, and now I want a pair for myself. Obviously this pair has to go to Josh’s mom, but man there’s a lot of reason to keep them eh? The more anal-retentive of you might have noticed a problem with (aka – lack of) a white eye on the right sheep. “But Bev,” I’m sure you’re thinking, “isn’t telling us about it just drawing attention to the issue? Most of us wouldn’t have noticed…” And you’re right. You probably wouldn’t have. But I am anal-retentive, so I’m definitely going to fix it. I figure that if I mention it here I’m more likely to remember to fix it before I give them to her.

My mom is positive that I’d be able to sell them for $20 apiece, but really, I spent all friggin’ day for two straight days working on these things! Sure, spending that money on yarn sure does sound nice, but still. If I have some left over from the yarn I got for my mom’s scarf (which is what I used for these), I think I’m going to make as many more pairs as I can, and if my mom wants one she’ll get one, and if I decide I want one I’ll get one, then the greedy bastards out there in the real world can have one if I feel magnanimous.

More about knitting tomorrow… but for now I have to get to bed a bit early because I’m getting picked up by Josh’s mom at 8am. Oof! It’ll be coffee for me in the morning! We remember why I’m getting picked up, right?

The Knitting & Fiber Expo!

Packages!

Posted on by

I’ve updated my wishlist, although that doesn’t really concern anybody.

Other than that, I did get a package yesterday! Very exciting. Wanna know what it is?

579

Ahem. That’s right, my Classic Elite Lush arrived. And you want to know what? I’ve already started knitting with it. I know that sounds funny since I’m currently supposed to be working on my own scarf, and this yarn if for my mom’s scarf, but…

I’m making arm/wrist -warmers for Josh’s mom, for Mother’s Day. The scarf will only use 6-7 skeins and I have a bag of 10, and the arm/wrist -warmers claim to only need as much yardage as is in one skein. Good times.

I had taken a picture of the yarn the day after I got it in the mail, but I couldn’t get my photo gallery to work properly, so now that Josh’s 1337 programming skills have managed to fix it, I’m much more able to post a nice little picture.

There’s even more knitting news. I finished one of the arm/wrist -warmers for Josh’s mom! I even embroidered/duplicate stitched a sheep onto it! Oh I know, it sounds adorable, and it really is. But I can’t post a picture right now because I don’t have one. I’m going to start knitting the other one tonight.

So far I really like the Lush yarn… it’s so soft! I had a bit of a problem getting started, because I didn’t know what to do about needle size. The pattern I was altering called for 40 stitches around on size 4 needles. Lush’s gauge says to use size 8 needles! Just using the size 8’s would have messed up the overall gauge and made them entirely too big, and probably more suited for legwarmers. And if I used the big needles and started with a fewer number of stitches, I wouldn’t have enough around to put on the sheep that goes on the back of the hand.

To add the icing on the cake, I didn’t even have size 4 dpns! I had my size 4 12″ circular, but I tried knitting 40 stitches around on that and it just wouldn’t work. I had to use dpns. Rather than buy some size 4’s, I just opted to use my size 3’s. Such crazy-ness. I was using needles 5 sizes too small for the yarn, but in the end it worked out. It looks really nice, with a very cute sheep. The drape of the fabric is actually very nice considering my hack… tight without feeling too much so. I think it’ll actually keep off the rain nicely.

I just hope they fit her, they’re nice on my hands but I have pretty small ones.

Pics of the arm/wrist -warmers tomorrow.

Easter

Posted on by

I felt decidedly un-easter-like the other day, because I was wearing jeans and a button-up shirt that was black and dark turquoise.  No white whatsoever.

But, Easter ended up being, well, you know… Easter.  Josh and I didn’t get the memo about the venue being moved, so when we got to North Bend we found out that they’d lost power (some truck ran over the power box) and that we’d need to go all the way back to Factoria.  So much for that drive eh?

The dinner was as expected… Josh’s grandmother was stressed out due to the change of plans, and we had to fit 13 people in their small-ish house.  We had ham, a jello mold, potato salad, apple sauce, pickles, olives, marshmallow salad, peas, and green beans.  Oh, and Minute Maid’s Cherry Limeade to drink.

We had to set up two long tables to fit everybody (we borrowed on from the church down the street), so the one we were at ended up being more of a kids table, which was actually nicer.

The rest of the time I knit, and we just kind of all chatted away.

That was basically Easter dinner.  We left at about 7:30pm, which was earlier than I expected, so that was also nice.

In other news, yesterday morning my mom called and we had coffee, after which I stayed at Tully’s and knit for a couple of hours.  But I didn’t have my shuffle, so the lack of music to listen to kind of cut my knitting time short.  I was ready to go home after about 2hrs.

That’s about all for yesterday.  Today I called my mom about a coffee question and we ended up having coffee again this morning, this time because there wasn’t any traffic so she had a bit of time.  And of course, again I stayed at Tully’s for a few hours (three this time) and knit some more.

My mom has been bugging my dad again about going down to California, so the good news is that I might be able to go down pretty soon with him.  She says that if he goes down there and gets going on selling the house, then they might be able to go on a cruise (because she won’t be paying for that).  And if they go on a cruise… well, you know I won’t let them go alone without putting up a fight first.  -grin-

Josh has a conference call today between 3-4pm, so he’ll be home a little late.  But we’re going to head over to Overlake and get some more chow fun noodles… yum!

Candles are fun

Posted on by

The IKEA trip was fun, although we stayed out much longer than I’d expected. Josh kind of knew that we’d end up being out past 6pm, but I was a bit too optimistic about it. At first he didn’t want to go, but in the end he did (so we could look for a little table/stand for next to the bed), and when we got home it was almost 7pm. Oof!

But we did end up getting tons of candles and candle-related accoutrement’s… we got two extra bricks of tea candles (100 each), a box of 50 (yes, 50!) of the “normal” tall skinny candles, and 6 cast iron skinny candle holders which are awesome. They’re tapered, and when oriented one way they hold the skinny candles perfectly, but when turned upside down they hold a tea candle! It’s pretty cool.

IKEA also had a little set of 4 glass tea candle holders, which are about half again as high as the tea candles themselves… the colors are various shades of green and blue, which is nice.

Because we went with my mom and she was using her gift card, she ended up getting us a french press to make coffee with, since we don’t really have a way to make coffee at the moment ourselves. It’s really fun, and we just used it this morning. Josh actually seems to kind of like it!

We have this big bottle of French Vanilla flavored syrup sitting in the cupboard, but it’s been sitting there awhile because neither of us like it much. But in coffee it’s not so bad. There’s still some coffee left from the stuff we made this morning. -grin-

It’ll be nice to be able to make my own iced coffee this summer.

After the IKEA trip, the three of us went to The Keg steakhouse, which was pretty good. I always like their bread, and their crab/spinach/cheese dip. I quite often have iced tea to drink, and surprisingly Josh ordered iced tea too! That was kind of fun.

I have to say though, I had this teriyaki classic meal, and the steak I got was much too chewy. I only ended up eating half of it (although I’d eaten a lot of bread and appetizer before hand), which was kind of sad. It would take me much too long to chew any one piece. Ah well.

As far as today goes, we’re headed out to North Bend again. Because I’d told Josh’s mom that we weren’t busy, she assumed that we’d be coming out to North Bend for Easter. And, since Josh doesn’t have or want to come up with a good excuse to be there, we’re going to be there (even though he really doesn’t want to go). I think so far the plan is to leave and get there at around 1:30pm for a 3:30pm dinner, and “work on the wireless” at camp until it starts. I doubt it’ll take that long though.

Josh claims that this time of all times will be the one where we don’t plan or end up staying until 9pm or so. We’ll see if he manages to pull it off. Heh.

IKEA

Posted on by

What are Josh and I doing today?  That’s right!  Going to IKEA.

My mom is going (she has a really nice gift card) and asked if we wanted to go with her.   I asked Josh if he wanted to go (expecting him to say no) and he actually did want to go!  Good times!  So she’s going to pick us up in a half hour or so and we’re going to head down and get some more tea candles, because we’re almost out.  And we had close to 200 before!  Oof!

Garage Sales!

Posted on by

It’s the season again!

I was browsing Craigslist yesterday and found a couple of garage sales this weekend that purported to have knitting and craft supplies.  Naturally that was exciting, so I thought, “why don’t I go and see if I can get some cheap needles?”

One sale was on Friday and Saturday, so at the last minute around noon I decided that I was going to go for it and walk down to the sale.  It ended at 3pm that day, so there wasn’t enough time for Josh to me because he didn’t get off work until then.  It was in Bellevue, about again as far away from the mall as the mall is from our apartment.

Off I went, happily walking around the backside of the mall to try and avoid the sun (it didn’t work).  I couldn’t find my nalgene bottle, so all I had was a mini-bottle of water.  The walk wasn’t so bad, except for the heat, that was kind of annoying.

Anyway, the walk to the house was a lot more uphill than I imagined it’d be, so by the time I arrived (2pm) I was a bit tired out.  So what happens when I get there?

“Oh I’m sorry!  A woman stopped by this morning already and bought out all the knitting stuff we had.”

-sigh-  So I’d missed out.  I ended up spending $2 and came away with a nice 3/4 length sleeve shirt and a bag ‘o pens for my sister.  The woman bought herself all the knitting stuff she’d need to get started when her friend gave her a bunch of new knitting stuff as well… since she “didn’t need two sets” she just put the new ones up at the garage sale.   So frustrating!  Too bad I didn’t find out about it earlier.

So, that was my day yesterday.  It was pretty fun walking outside, and on the way back I went to the library and hung out there waiting for Josh to get off of work.  I activated my library card while I was there (I went to the apts front office and got a copy of our renters insurance which has my name and new address on it) as well, so that was nice to get out of the way.  Now I can borrow library books on own without Josh being there too!

After Josh arrived to pick me up we stopped by and got some strawberry bubble tea, which was immensely yummy.  They had very little boba left, so they asked if jelly was acceptable instead… in the end they were very nice and put jelly and boba in our drink, which ended up being really good.

Uhh, afterwards Josh and I listened to the new podcast novel, The Rookie, which is turning out to be a lot of fun.   Woo!

Botanical Gardens

Posted on by

On Thursday I was talking to Josh and asked him if he wanted to sit upstairs with me on the “deck” when he got home.  He said he would, so I started getting dressed to go up there, but by the time he was home he wasn’t really interested in going up.

Anyway, in the end we decided that instead, because it was so nice outside, that we were going to go off to the gardens.  We ended up driving down, because it would have been kind of a long walk in the sun, but that gave us more time to walk when actually at the gardens.

While walking, what was I doing?  Knitting.  Yep, I had my strip from the woven scarf coming out of my bag and I was knitting it as we walked.  It was kind of amusing.

It was quite a nice afternoon… we ended up sitting on a bench near a mini-pond that had some mallard ducks in it, and one of them swam up to us to check us out.  We sat on the bench for awhile; Josh reading his book, and me knitting.

Very nice/fun/cute afternoon if I say so myself.  I’m glad Josh wanted to go with me.

Running Out

Posted on by

Of movies anyway. There are still a few in our collection that Josh and I haven’t managed to watch yet, but they are all movies that will take more concentration to watch than we’ve wanted to put in lately.

The other night Josh and I watched Spaceballs again, which is always fun. This morning I decided to watch The Shawshank Redemption, but before I put it in the mini I realized that Spaceballs might actually have an audio commentary track, so that might be a fun thing to watch while I knit. It didn’t turn out to be spectacular in the end, so that was slightly disappointing, even though it was a Mel Brooks commentary.

I’m not sure what I’ll do for the rest of today while I knit, but I might go back and watch Shawshank anyway.

As far as tomorrow goes, my mom ended up switching one of the days she worked at home this week, so instead of being at home on Friday she’s at home today. Which means that I’m going to have breakfast at Specialty’s with my dad and my mom tomorrow morning. Yay!

It’s so sunny outside that I think I might make a sandwich or grilled cheese and go upstairs to knit on the mini-deck up there.

More scarf progress!

Posted on by
573

Yep, I actually got somewhere on the scarf. I managed to take a picture this morning, so I thought I’d post it here on my blog. I opened the window to let in some sunlight, but the color is still a bit off. Better color representation is in the first picture of the yarn I posted.

I’m having fun knitting it, although using the size 4 12″ circ got a bit hard on my hands at the beginning. I think that’s what led to the soreness as the night wore on, even though I’d moved on to the first strip. Today I’ve been knitting about two hours and I seem to be fine, so here’s to hoping.

I think I’m about 24″ along on the first strip, maybe a bit more. If I manage to knit for most of each day I think I can get the first strip done by the end of the weekend.

So far the circular and an extra dpn are doing nice serving as stitch holders… none of the stitches have come close to coming off, so I might not even need to bother with those stitch cap things. This still is an awkward knit though. One big long string coming off of a disorganized mess (or what looks like one).

That’s about all the knitting news for today. I’ll post another picture once I’m done with the first strip.

How many is too many?

Posted on by

I bought more knitting needles today. I decided that in order to do the bottom of the scarf properly, I needed to use a circular needle, rather than a set of dpns. I had the epiphany this afternoon as I was trying to decide what to do about the unfortunate ladders that kept appearing on the beginning end of the scarf that I’d started at least three times already.

As might or might not be apparent, Skacel (makers of the infamous Addi Turbo) makes a 12″ circular in a variety of sizes. Like I mentioned in my previous post, I ended up calling Hilltop Yarn and asking if they had any in size 4, which they did.

So this afternoon Josh and I went over there and bought a pair of Addi Turbo size 4 12″ circs.

The only problem with that is, well, Addi Turbos are expensive, and I have the receipt to prove it. $18 for a set of needles, and in the smallest length of circular anyone makes! Way more than the $8 for a set of Clover dpns… but I sure did have an easier time making the bottom edge of the woven scarf with those Addis.

I’m already about 12″ into the 90″ that I’ll need to knit for the first rope, which is good, but I’ve taken a few minutes off to write this entry because my left thumb is starting to bother me from all the repetitive motion, and I need to let it rest. For the most part it doesn’t do anything when I type anyway, and even if it did I figured that the different motion might help it.

I’ll post a pic of the progress tomorrow.

In other knitting news I started reading the Andean Folk Knits book that I borrowed from the library. It’s a good thing I borrowed it too, since it was one I kind of had on my wishlist to buy if I happened to become rich. After reading it and admiring all the bits of historical information, I’ve decided that I do not like the patterns enough to really want a copy for myself. If I like anything it’s just some of the motifs that are used, because the meaning behind them is explained.

It’s a good thing that I already have a set of size 6 dpns for the other part of the project (you use size 4s for the ends, and size 6s for the woven strands), otherwise I would have had to spend even more money on some needles. I was nervous at first to be spending that much money on a set of size 4 12″ circs, because, well, what other use will I have for them? But as it turns out, this isn’t the only scarf that I’ll be making in the near future.

I proposed to my mom that she buy some yarn that’s on sale at LittleKnits… enough for me to make a scarf for her. This is the actual called for yarn in the pattern, called Classic Elite Lush, but you need 6 skeins at $10 a pop, versus the yarn I bought for myself with which I’ll only need 4 skeins, and they were $9.75 each. The called for yarn is also 50% wool and 50% angora, which should be very soft. I hear it’s really nice yarn besides.

Anyway, LittleKnits is selling it at 40% off, and there are 4 colors available, 3 of which are available in bags, with 10 skeins in a bag. So you can get $100 worth of yarn for $60. It’s a great deal! So I proposed that she buy a bag, have it sent to our apartment and I’ll use my own scarf as the dummy scarf (in case I screw up). Then I’ll knit hers out of her yarn and take the leftover skeins as payment for all of my effort (this scarf is labor-intensive… it takes awhile to knit). I’m always nervous about running out of yarn, so if the pattern is made with a specific yarn and says you need 6 skeins but doesn’t tell you how much you’ll have left over, I’m liable to want to buy a 7th just in case. Because of that, 10 skeins isn’t that much more than 7, right?

Anyway, I should have some yarn in the mail soon if my mom got around to ordering it tonight. It’s all very exciting for me, I promise.

As if this entry wasn’t long enough, I have something else to mention. The stitch pattern book that I just got has a pattern for a sheep that is the cutest thing ever. And, as it turns out, if my mom gets the green yarn for her scarf I’ll have in my stash and what it leftover from the scarf all I’ll need to fashion some really cute arm warmers out of the green Classic Elite Lush with an adorable, fuzzy, sheep on the back of the hand.

It should be extremely cute, and sounds perfect for Josh’s mom. And with Mother’s Day just around the corner it could work out very nicely. Oh, and a former failed scarf design attempt left me with $50 worth of various yarns that I purchased on a whim in a range of earthy tones and colors… one of which (in texture and color) looks exactly like grass. You can see where this is going, right? I’m going to make a little line of fuzzy grass under the feet of the sheep in the arm warmers. So cute!

Enough knitting talk for now. I should get back to actual knitting I expect.