Radio Silence

Wow, it really has been a while, hasn't it?

Part of this is that I've been depressed, but another part is that I've been busier knitting than I have writing about it. You see, I got involved in a design project, and it ate my entire knitting life for a while. (I suspect it will again when I get back to it.)

I'm attempting to design a traditional (i.e., bottom-up) Faroese shawl in sea-and-land motifs. Unfortunately, this means that the first line is "cast on 427" and every time I mess up, I have to rip the entire thing and start over. The good thing is that I bought a cone of green laceweight from Webs a while ago and I've got so much of it that when I really mess up I just throw the entire thing in the garbage and start fresh, without feeling too guilty about it. (Actually, being in Berkeley, I put it in the "organics recycling" trash, which reduces the guilt even further.)

No photos, because right now it just kind of looks like, well, a blob of green cotton that might or might not have a "Print O' the Wave" pattern forming. (It's the decreasing that's getting to me -- I picked out the patterns and all of them work but this one, assuming I've gotten my shaping decreases right.)

Other knitting... Well, my older (step)brother had a baby around Christmas, and I'm going to her naming ceremony next weekend. (It's like a christening, except they're Jewish. Same idea, though -- welcome to the community, meet everyone, get presents, etc.) So I've been knocking out baby things like there's no tomorrow -- I made a Mason-Dixon baby kimono out of some white acrylic I had lying around (amazingly cute), and a set of bibs out of the kitchen cotton I've been making my washcloths out of. (Handwash only does not sound like a good choice for the mother of a newborn!) I'm also making a set of matching burp clothes, just 'cause, and I've been spending hours and hours on Ravelry looking at patterns and trying to figure out what I can do with the yarn I already have. I don't know his wife very well, so I can't tell what her reaction would be to a nursing shawl or anything like that, although I still feel that I should make something for her as well as for the baby.

Everything else is pretty much stalled. I did some knitting on the alpaca North Star scarf (which is rapidly turning into the alpaca North Star stole, give how enormous it is), and I've been rather grimly knitting away on the Kinzel Daffodil thing. I need to remember that endless acres of "k/p into next stitch; k2tog" while very pretty is really fussy and boring. Sigh.

I keep going into Lacis, which isn't very good for either my determined yarn diet or my straightened wallet -- I've thusfar managed to resist *both* the $60 lace book full of beautiful patterns that I don't like very much in the book (although I love the ones other people have made) and the Yarn Place Grace laceweight, even if it does come in a really gorgeous saturated purple. Stash knitting is good for you, right? (Maybe things I buy for the baby don't count? I've already had to buy buttons and ribbon...)

I'm debating giving the baby the Baby Surprise Jacket. Yes, yes, it's a Baby Surprise Jacket after all, but it's also made of Cascade 220, which is gonna be a pain to wash. I'll have to ponder (and in my pondering, put on the buttons I bought a while ago, which are ridiculously cute). It's not like coats need all that much washing anyway, is it? Of course, I've only got a week to think about it and to figure out which side of things the buttons go on for girls. I think the buttons go on the right and the buttonholes on the left.

So yes. Baby knitting and ridiculous design projects. How are you?

Turtles and photos and blog clients, oh, my...

Someone pinged me on Ravelry to ask if they could use my Barbara Walker Turtle scarf as the "official" Turtle Pattern photo. Somehow, this terrifies me. Out in the big wide world, people are going to see my acrylic knitting as the ur-Turtle. Now, I know that people don't really expect the photos of stitch patterns to be anything like as good as the photos of actual patterns, but still, somehow I'm worried that I'm going to get hordes of Barbara Walker fangirls pinging me and asking how I could possibly think that my Caron Simply Soft play-knitting was good enough to be used as The Photo for this pattern. (See what I worry about when I'm not busy enough?)

In actual knitting news, the grey Pi is done. Finished. Well, almost over with, really. It's off the needles, at least, which means it can go marinate in my "to be blocked" pile until I can stand the sight of it. No new photos, but since I haven't put one here before, here's the old photo of it (several dozen rows before it was finished, but looking about the same, except this photo's got needles in - not that you can see them here, but if you could, they'd be size 4 Addi Turbos):




Although I was desperately tempted to go ahead and cast on for the Mystic Waters mystery shawl that I've got clues for and am way behind on, I decided to virtuously try to finish at least one more project before I did. Not that I was sensible and picked the cabled scarf I've got half a ball of yarn left on, oh, no. I picked the Log Cabin of DOOOOM, although I must admit that it's because the LCoD has gotten too big to be anything other than messy sitting around in the living room, and I think it's starting to bother TG. (I realized reading over the first few entries last night that I have been inconsistent in my acronyms,and I shall have to fix that).

My camera's screen is broken and I can't afford to have it fixed, so this is going to continue to be a photo-light blog, at least in terms of new projects. I am solemnly assured by my own experience and other knitbloggers that there must be a picture in every entry, though, so I think I'm going to start blogging the old projects, so that we can memorialize my "oooooh, knitting" phase (before I got to the "oooooh, knitting with things that aren't made from dead dinosaurs" phase I'm in now, you see). Hopefully that'll encourage me to post more often, too, because I'm starting to feel guilty about neglecting the poor little blog. I downloaded a whole new web browser; just so I could have a blog client, so we'll see. (ETA: And it looks like that client screws up the HTML so badly that I'm not really sure that it's any good either. Feh.)

More faux-content

I promise I'll put some real knitting content up here soon, but for now, you can find it on Ravelry under username aiglet.