Bad, bad blogger.

After being utterly miserably ill during and after Thanksgiving, and then depressed and crazy for most of December, I have finally returned to the land of the living, just in time to say goodbye to the old year and hello to the new one.

Lest you think that I haven't been knitting, rest assured that I have, I just haven't gotten around to documenting any of it. :)

I finished my green Hemlock Ring (only to discover a dropped stitch while I was blocking it, which I have carefully stuck a stitch marker into and will rescue when I go on my next finishing kick). It's a lot smaller than I was expecting, even after looking at the finished dimensions in the pattern and thinking "gee, that's kind of little." Of course, that may be because I'm comparing it to my log cabin, which after two washings (and therefore two dryings, one hung over my shower curtain rod and one properly blocking in an attempt to make it square again instead of oval) has grown to about 6x7 feet. Not that I'd really know, since my friend S. is usually under it -- she still maintains that it's her favorite thing in the house, including the residents, the cat, and our cable, which has what she refers to as the "porn channel" (aka Chiller, the all-bad-80's-horror channel).

After finishing the blanket, I had all this Eco left over. I wasn't really sure that it was enough for another one (despite having about 1.5 skeins of my 3 skeins left over -- I really think I finished HM when I did because I was tired of knitting feather-and-fan). In my insanity, I cast on for what has become known as "the world's ugliest sweater." Using Barbara Walker's instructions in Knitting From the Top, I carefully made a seamless V-neck raglan. I even put a crochet finish around the neckline to keep it from getting wonky. Unfortunately, when I ran out of yarn, I had, oh, 70% of a sweater. It hit on my high hip and had about 3/4 length sleeves. Well, what's a shawl knitter to do when she needs to add length to things? That's right, knit on a border! Keep in mind here that I don't actually own any of the "how to knit borders" books, I just own a whole bunch of lace knitting books. So... I dug out Victorian Lace Today (well, okay, I looked through all my pattern books and decided to use VLT), picked out two relatively similar borders (a smaller one for the sleeves and a bigger one for the bottom), and knitted on three borders. They're perfectly well knitted, they're beautifully attached, and I swear to you that if the sweater weren't made of the only color on the face of this earth that doesn't go with the black Paton's Merino I knitted them in, it would probably look okay. On a black sweater, it might even be cute.

Okay. I have accepted that my sweater is kind of ugly. That's okay, it'll just be a house sweater. Then I put it on. The sleeves are way too long -- fortunately, folding them in half fixes that problem perfectly and doesn't look too terrible, since the lace edging is scalloped at the bottom. Unfortunately... The weight of the bottom border has tugged the body of the sweater down so far that the new bottom of the sweater is pretty much at my knees. I'm really incredibly tempted to block it down just a bit further and then wear it out of the house, claiming that it's that incredibly trendy "short ugly dress over jeans" thing. (I only have to block it down because it doesn't quite cover my rear in the back, which ruins the effect. Plus, well, lace requires blocking and I can't suppress the habit.) I shall have to poll my gentle readers when I get some photos of this thing. (But hey! My first sweater! And it fits in all the places that it should fit! Well, the armscyes might be a bit on the small side, but not unwearably so.)

What else? The mini-cable scarf is dead, long live the mini-cable scarf. I remembered how short the first one was and decided that it was sort of silly to make another scarf I knew I was going to think was funny looking. So I ripped it out and have started a Toddle with it instead. My oldest stepbrother, AAJr. and his wife AALady (yes, seriously), just had their first baby, a girl (who fortunately was named something starting with a letter *other* than A!), so I'm going to send them the BSJ (more on this in a minute) now and the Toddle for next year's holidays (is that pre-planning or what). Fortunately for little EA, they're Jewish, so hopefully she won't run into the "birthday at Christmas" problem quite so badly.

The BSJ is done, all except for the buttons. Unfortunately, I'm having some problems getting buttons. The nearest button store to me is only open Fridays and Saturdays, 11 - 4, but I shall persevere and hopefully remember this week that I have to go during that time. Meanwhile, the 3-mile round trip is probably good for me, and I do get to go by the comic book store while I'm at it, even if I can't buy anything.

Shedir has been abandoned for the moment, as has the North Star. Instead, I'm spending all my "fussy knitting" time on a Daffodil tea cloth/shawl from Marianne Kinzel's Second Book of Modern Lace Knitting. I'm using the same grey weaving wool as I did for the grey Pi, since I've got enough of it to do anything. The disastrous start I made on Mystic Waters was been ripped to be retried at a later date. I suspect I may need bamboo size 4s to knit it with the Alpaca Cloud, since what killed it was a stitch I dropped in row 70 or so that I just couldn't get back up. I'll have to try it again sometime when I'm less stressy.

And that's about it for knitting. (Oh, and the Noro cartridge rib scarf I'm making to use up the last of the Silk Garden 8 while I wait for TB to make up his mind about which colors he wants on his stripey scarf, but that hardly counts. I mostly started it because I was having the kind of day where it takes you four tries to type something like "and," and I was looking for a project that was too simple to mess up.) Other than that... Nothing much changes. I'm still unemployed and therefore on a yarn diet. My parents bought us a new microwave for Christmas, so I'm on a big "let's gather up all the old electronics for the recycling center" kick. Houseguests and parties and cleaning, oh my!

I hope you're having a nice end-of-the-year, with appropriate holiday wishes all around.

Confessional

I watch way too much TV, often during the day after it's been aired, so I can fast forward through all the boring commercials (although I have been known to stop and watch one if it's got something interesting going on).

One of the new shows I've picked up this season is Pushing Daisies. Sadly, it's got all the hallmarks of a show that's not going to make it. PD is the show that made me realize I needed a knitting blog, when they showed Chi McBride (who plays one of the main characters) knitting as a stress reliever. They even said that he was knitting in stockinette because he found it soothing, and made a point of saying he was on a purl row later when he had to put his knitting down. It even looked like he was *actually* purling at the time -- they showed him making more than one stitch.

At the end of the show, they show him in a knitted vest and two knitted handgun covers (he's a private detective), and I thought, "gee, I really want to squee about how knitting's gotten so popular that they can put it on new TV and expect everyone to take this for granted, guess I'd better get a knit-blog..."

In actual knitting content, last night was the inaugural meeting of the Berkeley North Starbucks knitting thing. It was just me and one other person, which I actually kind of liked -- we got to sit and chatter away and get to know each other without trying to connect to lots of people all at once. She can't make it next week, but the person who I was originally organizing it with (who couldn't come this week) can, so maybe I'll get to meet another nifty person solo.

Sadly, even though I knew J. (the person who came this week) couldn't make it before 6:30 due to Monkey-care issues, I went at 5 anyway just in case anyone else wanted to come. They didn't. On the other hand, I got 20 rows of my Arctic Lace project (the North Star scarf) knitted, so I suppose it was a net win. Once J. showed up, I switched over to the mini-scarf I've got going as a travelling project, since complicated charted lace doesn't exactly lend itself to conversation.

It might be worth pointing out that perhaps splitty alpaca yarn (Garnstudio Drops Alpaca) combined with slippery metal needles (the size 4s from my Boye Interchangeables kit) isn't the best idea ever. I managed to not drop any stitches, but I'm going to consider that a gift from the knitting gods. The yarn's not really that bad, but since I had to rip out my cast-on three times before giving up and doing a knitted cast-on, I got a bit frustrated with it. (I kept under- or over-estimating the amount of yarn I needed for my long-tail cast-on, because despite knowing all kinds of tricks for estimating it, I always forget them in the heat of the moment.) The pattern is showing up beautifully, though, so I'm quite pleased. I suspect that my scarf is going to be a lot wider than the 10" the book says you should be getting with quiviut on size 3s, but that's okay -- I like nice wide scarves.

The mini-cable is going well, just like it did last time. The seed-stitch edges are doing this neat thing where the stitches pull apart from each other, leaving a sort of lattice effect. (I know it's not supposed to do that, but since it's never done it in any other yarn/needle combo, I'm not too worried about my ability to do non-weird seed stitch, and it is neat looking.) I was thinking of giving it to TG's father for Christmas, but TG pointed out reasonably that his father is something of a giant, and that perhaps a scarf that I refer to as "mini" isn't the best choice, even if I do try to pass it off as a cravat. He was properly impressed by my cabling without a cable needle, though -- I don't think he's ever seen me cable before. I must admit that one of the things I like about cables is that they're almost as good as lace for acheiving the "how'd you do that" effect.

No pictures of anything at this point, because I haven't gotten around to digging out the camera -- even though I'm deeply enamoured of the whole "putting pictures on Ravelry" thing, using the camera with the broken screen in the back is just an unbelievable pain, especially since the break is spreading. I shall have to scrape up the money to get it fixed.