Tons of Knitting, but no Talking

I've been hibernating from, well, most of my life recently. I've been doing plenty of knitting, but I haven't been talking about it much. Some of it didn't even make it into Ravelry before I gave it away.

I finished the big Alpaca scarf, but the person I was going to send it do died. I had made her a very large alpaca Kiri (I think it was a Kiri, it was definitely some kind of leaf lace) and she loved it so much that I thought she might like something smaller to wear all the time. I didn't manage to finish it in time. (Although I suppose that's unfair to me, given how unexpected it was.) I was thinking of sending it to her daughter, but it blocked out a *lot* shorter than I thought it would, so I'm not sure it's a useable size for a full-size person.

I've also been doing some baby knitting -- my boss is pregnant, and doesn't apparently have anyone to knit for her, so I've been trying to make things. Unfortunately, I'm not so good at cranking out things to order and it's been slow going. I guess I'm just not cut out to knit to order, even when it's my *own* order. I've got about half a baby hat, but since the main body of it is knit in reverse stockinette on size 1 DPNs, it may be a while. It's a good thing I don't believe in giving baby presents before the baby is born!

To soothe my soul, I finally started my red Frost Flowers and Leaves, but I have no photo of that. It's gotten off the DPNs to the Magic Loop stage, but it still looks like a crumpled red ball of ramen. The color is gorgeous, though. I'm really pleased.

Since Seanan has to go to San Jose today and Himself is out of town, I restarted Shedir to have something relatively portable to take with me. It's currently on size 2 needles, so we'll see if that makes it small enough. I sort of refuse to put Calmer on size one needles, that's just... silly. Besides, my size one DPNs are in the baby hat. I suppose I could get a small diameter size one circ from KnitPicks and use that if I really have to, but since I'm staring down the face of some really expensive dental work, I'm not sure it's worth spending the money when I can just wait for the DPNs to be available.

So that's pretty much the state of my knitting. I'm sorry I've been so quiet recently. I shall try to be less neglectful.

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?

Catastrophe.

So there I am, knitting blithely along on my Mystic Waters, la di da, this is nice easy knitting, as long as I can figure out how to keep my pattern propped up...

At row 123, I felt something weird a bit down in my knitting. Oh, it's a dropped stitch. No... It's... one, two, three, four dropped stitches. But... I have the right stitch count here. I must have dropped them out of decreases further down.

Having blithely told people over and over that all you have to do is drop down the offending section and reknit it, I decided to do this thing myself. Apparently I'm better at giving advice than at actually knitting (those who can't do, teach?), and I just can't seem to fix it at all. Perhaps it's because it's way over on an edge, so I'm not just dropping stitches, but I'm also creating them as I pick it back up.

I'm about this close to just ripping the entire thing out and starting over -- I can't even find a proper non-patterned row somewhere further down to put a lifeline in, so I'd have to rip the entire thing all at once.

This, of course, is what I get for the hubris of alpaca laceweight on Addi Turbos, and chobbling off all my fingernails so I can't use them to pull my stitches into proper decreases. I think I'm going to give this one more try (I'll probably have to rip back the entire corner and then try to rebuild the whole thing), and then just rip the entire business and start over again after the holiday.

When you forget to read your knitting...

But first, a quick meta note: I foolishly upgraded my computer to the beta version of Leopard (Apple's new OS) about a week ago, and have had incredibly flaky internet access since, which is why I haven't been around. They have now released the final version, so I should be upgrading to something a bit more stable soonish.

Meanwhile, in knitting news...

The grey Pi continues, sort of. I got through to the last 20 rows (thank goodness), but I screwed something up. You know, when you get to rows of almost 1000 stitches, it behooves you to pay lots of attention to what you're doing. Sigh. I got about halfway through row 98 (um, that's patterned rows, so it's actually row... 196?), cheerfully knitting away, only to discover that I'd gotten off my count and was putting my patterns in the wrong place. 400 stitches of tinking, here I come. I must admit that I'm tired of this project and kind of want to just pull it off my needles and put it in the trash and pretend it never happened, but I'm so close to the end that I can't quite bring myself to. Besides, I know that's only because the Mystic Waters KAL has started and I really want to knit the first clue on these needles.

Must not abandon almost finished project for new project just because I'm tired of it, right?

Okay, so I'm sure all you pi shawl knitters are looking at this entry a bit sideways and thinking "what kind of insane person gets to past the 6th increase row and still isn't done?" Okay, fair. I think it's that I like my shawls really long in the front, and when I stretch out the plain garter bit, it's only just going from shoulder to waist. Somehow I suspect the blocking gods are laughing at me, though, and when I finally finish, it's either still not going to be long enough, or it'll be enormous and I'll have to give it to A., who's a giant.

It would be a fair revenge on A., though, since I called her about a week ago to find out how big her head is and she still hasn't returned my call. I want to make her a Shedir hat out of the same grey Drops alpaca I'm using for the North Star scarf, but I know she's got a big head and I want to make sure it'll fit before I cast on. Huge grey Pi would be a suitable revenge, I think.

The North Star scarf proceeds apace. It's become my KIP project, much to the amusement of the Wednesday Stash ladies. I don't think I'm going to go to that knit night anymore, though. I rather like some of the people, but the group is really huge, and I think I talk too much for them (or perhaps it's just that I'm overly foul-mouthed). I had a lovely time until everyone showed up, though, so maybe I'll go for the pre-knit-night agglomeration and leave at 6:15... I'm trying to snaffle the people I really like for the Mondays At Starbucks, so we'll see. It was just sort of funny to see everyone saying "oh, you can't knit that in public!" Of course, since they said that, I managed to have to tink one row about five times (before figuring out that, like a good little idiot I'd managed to knit the wrong row), but I did finally get another four rows or so done.

Next week's Monday should be good, though, since I think the person who came last week (R.) and the person who came the week before (J.) will get along famously, and we'll have to see if anyone else shows up. Amusingly, R. and J. are both knitting projects out of the exact same yarn (well, it's the same brand and it looks like the same color), so I'll get to be envious of all the Smooshy Sock I've ever encountered all at once! Alpaca revenge shall be mine, though.

Anyway, now that I've gotten the Endless Bloody Pi rant out of my system, I shall go back to my tinking and watching "educational" TV while waiting for my weekend houseguest to show up. (Well, she's TG's houseguest, really, but since he's not here, being at the airport collecting her, I shall claim her for the moment.)

Grey is not my friend.

I'm sure it seemed like a good idea, lo these many months ago when my last bout of startitis took over my brain, to start two grey projects at once.

I have these huge cones of grey wool I ordered from WEBS, you see, and I felt bad that I hadn't done anything with them, so I started knitting things from them. (Lots of things, actually -- I managed to finish two lace shawls before running into my current problem.)

I live in California, where there are two seasons -- the green season and the brown season. I started all these projects in the brown season, when it was beautiful and sunny almost every day, and the grey was just a soothing color that didn't require a lot of thought to knit with. Now, it is the green season, where the skies match my yarn and all the light is that weird cloud-light that leaves you wondering if it would be totally environmentally irresponsible to turn the lights on. It's kind of depressing to be knitting on grey things right now, when I want bright, beautiful colors to keep me cheered up. But I must persevere, in the name of cleaning up my knitting area(s).

My grey Pi shawl is nearing completion -- I've got one more repeat of my current pattern to go, and then I think I'm going to have to do at least a couple of repeats of the next one to balance it out. The top of the shawl has smaller, daintier patterns, so I'd feel weird just ending it with the big bold pattern I put in for the third patterned section. Also, I tend to like my shawls big, and I can't tell how big this one is yet. I think it's not quite big enough, though -- if I hold it up to my shoulders and try to stretch out the front (since it's a Pi-square rather than a proper Pi), it doesn't quite come down to my waist. I know that's not the same as a real wet blocking, but it gives me some idea, at least. Of course, since each row gets longer and longer, "nearing completion" feels more like the sort of pretty lie you tell yourself to finish a workout than it does an actual quality of the knitting. I'd put it down and let it hibernate, but since I'm knitting directly off the cone, I think that would get messy. Besides, I want my size 4 Addis back to use on something else.

My grey Miss Lambert's Veil from Victorian Lace Today, however, has been languishing by the comfy chair for the last four weeks, patiently waiting for me to get back to it. Much like the Pi, it's being knitted off a cone, so I can't just put it away somewhere, and I don't want to rip. I think when I'm done with the Pi, I'm going to have to move the Veil over by my TV-watching station, and try to figure something out for reading the pattern out of the book. Maybe I'll make a copy so I can put it on my clipboard like I've been doing with the Pi.

Oh, well. At least it's finally getting chilly enough that I won't feel silly working on my Log Cabin. Knitting Cascade 220 in the middle of the summer was a bit odd-feeling, although I know that if I want my huge Log Cabin to keep me warm when the real rains come, I have to knit during the dry season to have any reasonable hope of finishing it. I suspect that BC will steal it every time she comes over, though -- she feels the cold more than I do, and the Log Cabin is wonderfully squishy and warm. It's brought me a new respect for the humble garter stitch.

If I can finish the Pi and the Veil and the Log Cabin and the Wavy scarf, I can cast on for another non-travelling project. Despite what it may look like, I much prefer project monogamy (well, for values of monogamy that mean "one for at home and one for out-and-about, but given my preference for lace, I don't think that's unreasonable). I still have two travelling projects, but given how much KIP I've been doing recently, I'm not going to stress about it -- although I might stress about not having anything portable queued up to replace them.

Anyway, less chattering, and more going to take a shower and get ready for my day.

So I don't bore other people...

I knit. I think about politics. I need to say things that involve knitting and television and other things.

So... here I am, creating a pseudo-knitting blog so I can rant about my projects and random knitting sightings.

Hopefully, it'll only ever be read by people who won't be bored by that sort of thing.