As they say in the Vaterland...

Ich bin dran. The lovely earthchic(k), originatress of the Seven Things project, has tagged me. The meme? 7 random things about me. I don't think this is coincidence, do you?

1. I was a conlanger in my youth. I made up languages- words, grammar, alphabets. Now I just make up alphabets and study conlangs that other people make up. This leads to the world's most awesome penpal arrangements. (!Shorah brehgeltahnteeokh D'ni)

2. I am considering consolidating all my blogs into this one.

3. I use the Dvorak keyboard layout, which is easier on my wrists (and therefore allows me more comfortable knitting time). However, people no longer like to share computers with me, since I have a habit of forgetting to switch the keyboard back, leaving the next unlucky person to wonder why the keyboard is typing gibberish.

4. I only eat cucumbers with feta cheese. I cannot stand either one of those foods separate from the other. This is a leftover from my trip to Greece, where the one food we could count on having at every single meal was a "salad" of cucumbers, feta, and tomatoes. And I don't like tomatoes.

5. This did not stop me from growing tomatoes last year on the patio last year.

6. My favorite prime number is 17, which totally pwns 23. 7 is my least favorite prime number, because I feel it gets overused. 5 doesn't get enough attention as a prime number, and 3 is too obvious; 2, on the the other hand, is too showy. I mean, isn't it enough of a distinction to be a prime number without having to be an even number, too?

7. Far, far back in the recesses of my childhood lies the beginning of a recurring dream, in which I find levels and levels of extra rooms under the church I grew up in. There are all sorts of odd statues, artifacts, sculptures, and parents of Sunday school classmates with the bodies of giant tarantulas. Going downstairs is more interesting, but after having this dream for about ten years, I finally discovered that if you climb up through the attics, you'll come out on a mountaintop where there's awesome snowboarding.

I, as usual, will decline to tag anyone.

Detailed knitting updates will have to wait for the weekend, but suffice it to say I'm on a manic knitting streak and I'm wearing my arms out trying to finish up a gift. You'll get to see it once the recipient has seen it first.

I'm going to my first SnB tonight- wish me luck!

Infodump!

I moved the yarn pile from the living room into my bedroom today. (Apologies to PSD, who was probably having a quiet moment in his office while I was doing this upstairs. I didn't keep dropping things intentionally, I promise.) As I relocated, I also took a detailed count of what was in the pile, and I came up with:

19 works in progress
179 balls, hanks, skeins, and blobs of yarn

Not as bad as I feared. It helped that there is no longer a frog pond: I threw all that stuff away. Thrift, shmift. Ripping out old sweaters is a pain, and for cheap cotton, it's totally not worth it.

Instead, I am now reveling in my pile of indulgence yarn, and hoping I can make it last a while. Here, friends, is where those forty yarn blobs were added:


Merino Sei. This almost doesn't count, since it was marked down from $8 to $3 per ball. I wouldn't feel guilty about it, except that I pounced on the opportunity and bought enough for two sweaters. I did not know that fate led me to just the right colors for this:

My Harry Potter House sweater. I am in a little bit of denial about the color of the stripe; I'm telling myself it's blue and not purple and that it really is in Ravenclaw colors (blue and bronze), so play along, okay? I am so looking forward to wearing this in the middle of July, when the Peony and I are going to our Hometown, which will be turned into Hogwarts Central for the night. I have already started praying that the man in a kilt and a poncho will show up. (Go read Book 4 again and come back when you get it.)

Moving forward. This...

...is the reason it's a bad idea to talk to me about how much yarn I buy. This was a revenge purchase. 19 hanks of fairly nice cotton. It's not much to look at now, but... well, I'm making up the sweater as I go, so it may not be much to look at ever. Just don't tell that to the evil person who hounded me about my yarn investments. (He, of course, has been spending my annual yarn budget on woodworking tools.)

In moments of happiness and sale-price hypnotism, there was also this:

(Sierra and Silky Wool)

...and this...

...the A-squared sweater, so named for the angora and alpaca yarn it's made from. This sweater is partially knit from the stash; the angora was a birthday present from the Peony. The alpaca, on the other hand, was a problem. If her book had come out sooner, I might have heeded the Harlot's advice: don't stand by the counter too long. 600 glorious yards of undyed superfine alpaca? Of course I had to get two colors. It's doubled up in the sweater to match the worsted-weight angora.

I do have exactly one guilt-free item, knit entirely from the stash:

The Mermaid sock. It's one of Lucy Neatby's patterns in Cool Socks, Warm Feet, and I love it. I changed the heel and the toe, of course, because I can't follow a pattern to save my life. But I really like the way the pattern works with the stripes. At the hospital, though, they apparently thought it was dangerous:



...because it came back to me in a biohazard bag. Maybe the size 0 needles scared them.

Now, gentle reader, I am off to eat dinner. And after that, I'm going to pick up a project from my pile. Between all the sweaters, afghans, socks, and stuffed animals on my WIP list, I suppose I shouldn't have any trouble finding something interesting to knit- in theory.

Battles and wars

Some of you may have noticed that it's been several weeks since I posted anything on any of my blogs. I am glad to report that I am making my way, slowly but surely, out of the blog silence. With any luck, my life will decide to be less absolutely maddeningly crazy, making it possible for me to become acquainted with the internet again.

What have I been doing in the meantime? Well... falling off the stash wagon. In a big way. I didn't even make it all the way through Lent. There are times in life, I feel, that require comfort yarn no matter what previous resolutions one might have made, and I hit several of those times. I think, though, that my LYSs (both of them) are partly to blame: they have been putting things on sale especially to tempt me. I mean, Malabrigo and Koigu PPPM at 50% off? How am I supposed to resist that?

While the stash wagon was rolling off into the sunset, the WIP wagon was not far behind it. I've been on something of a sweater kick lately, and I've been starting one with pretty much every new yarn purchase. Alas, I have not been in the mood to finish things, so I have- wait, let me count- four sweaters on the needles (I think it's just four, I could be wrong) and still no more actual wearable sweaters than I had a year ago. But boy, knitting sweaters sure is fun!

However! I am not giving up! I'll be relocating the yarn swamp soon (from the living room to my room, since roomie has moved on), and when I do, I will update the yarn stats on the sidebar. Try not to look to shocked when I do. I think my yarn weight now exceeds my body weight, which is a strong statement coming from the woman who's eaten Cocoa Crispies for dinner for the past week. I'll be chasing the wagon down and hopping back on it, whether the other yarnoholics want me on board or not. And when I do, I'll flash my stash again and give a tour of my WIP pile, including such items as:

• A sweater or two- or three- or more
  
• Various half-hearted attempts at stashbusting
  
• More Ann and Kay-inspired thriftiness
  
• Evidence of total lack of thriftiness
  
• ...and some items that will come in handy on July 11

Stay tuned. You won't want to miss it. (Well, I don't want you to miss it, so come back anyway.)

♫ Busy, busy, dreadfully busy... ♫

Once I actually started hauling out the knitting I've done since my last update, I was kind of surprised. I've been busy, all right. Just not on a single project. Knitting infidelity is just in my nature.

But first, the outcome of that luverly sunshiny yarn.



I'm calling it the Sunshine Shawl of Absolutely No Subtlety, because- well, I suppose you can see why! It started with the choice to use short row shaping to make something roundish (inspired by Knitty's Bloom shawl pattern), which made the stripes run longways like rays of sunshine. By the time I got to the end of the body section, I had plenty of yarn left over, so I figured I'd drive the imagery home with a sledgehammer and add a pointy edging.

It was good to get it out of my system. And boy, did it make me happy while I was knitting it. It still needs blocking, but I'm reasonably pleased with it as a quick, soothing knit in the middle of a long winter.

After that- at least, I think it was after that- I started two other projects, both from the stash.



The dishcloth is part of a stack of dishcloths I'm making, six years too late. See, when my grandma taught me to knit, she bought me some sparkly Sugar and Cream and a book of dishcloth patterns, on the condition that I knit her some dishcloths. I intended to, but the first patterns I tried were too hard and came out looking like the incarnation of suck. I proceeded to mostly forget about my promise until recently, when I started making dishcloths for Da House. I put as many handknit dishcloths in the kitchen as I thought were reasonable, which was only a few more than fit in the drawer, but my appetite for dishcloth knitting was not sated. Which was when I remembered my Ancient Promise to Nana. I hope this will help me kill off the unending cone of Sugar and Cream that's haunting my yarn shelves.

The sock is made from souvenir yarn; I made a very amateur hat for The Peony with it for Christmas a few years ago (which she graciously treasured, even though I made it exactly not to her specifications). It was also my first experience with yarn that came in a hank, which meant mostly that I sat on my bed for hours trying to untangle this messy new kind of skein I had discovered. Not a pleasant experience. The sock, thankfully, is only a little bit enormous on my foot, instead of the usual circulation-obstructing tight socks I usually make. I figure it's wool, so I can adjust it somehow, right? Right?

Okay. Brief pause for a less enthusiastic moment. I loved Eunny Jang's twisted I-cord bind-off, and I had planned to make a really awesome tank out of it. But! I had next to no idea about sweater construction when I planned this. Plus, the yarn is recycled cotton from a thrift store sweater, and the way the plies are, it's basically like knitting with three strands of crappy string held together. Say goodbye, sweater.



Because you, and your accompanying yarn, are hitting the trash can. How's that for stash and WIP reduction?

(Someone please remind me to pull out my needles before I set the trash can on fire.)

And now, as promised...

It's the How Many FOs Will This Skein Make? Show!

The goal is pretty simple. I take one skein of yarn and make a lot of little things out of it. The more, the better. Theoretically, all the same. If you have frequent second sock episodes or can't stand knitting in garter stitch, well, this is probably not the game for you, but you're welcome to watch. (But if you must faint, please do it outside; I just "organized" the stash, and anywhere you fall you're likely to disarrange hours of difficult yarn wrangling.)

For my hopefully-not-too-monotonous one-skein kniting premiere...



It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mitten-Making Marathon!

The mittens are roughly baby-sized and thumbless. I'm making them from Lorri's pattern. The yarn is a supersoft acrylic from my other grandma, who had it lying around somewhere. (I appreciate all gifts of yarn, so I try not to ask too many questions.) The yarn is very very very plain white, so I'm thinking I'll make a big batch of mittens, then use yarn scraps to embroider something small and cute and mitten-y on the backs. The finished mitts will be going to KnitWits, because what I could I do with a massive pile of baby mittens? I made two pairs this afternoon (each mitten takes me about an hour right now) and I'm not even bored with the pattern yet.

And did you know those plastic zippered things that bedsheets come in are perfect for storing knitting? Seriously. Actual zippers, and no way are the needles poking through that plastic. It's a little ghetto, but I'd rather spend the money on yarn. (Except that, like the rest of the high-church knitting world, I gave up buying yarn for Lent. Rats.)

Coming attractions!

Just popping in to say that I spent my spring break sleeping till after noon, watching TV, and doing a little knitting. I'll catch y'all up on the progress tomorrow, but here are the previews:

• The FO from the Yarn of Sunshiny Happiness
  
• The new WIP, which is actually from the stash, I swear
  
• Episode 1 of the How Many FOs Will This Skein Make Show!
  
• ...and I will finally do the Unthinkable and take Desperate Measures

Stay tuned. It should be good.

Lead us not into temptation

So... the stash grew.

The first purchase was intentional. I've been longing to knit a sweater for a while now, and when I got my tax return, I knew just what it wanted to become: the Stacy Pullover from Big Girl Knits.



Look at the yummy stitch pattern! (The color is digitally unenhanced- I couldn't figure out a way to keep the color and the stitch definition. :/) I'm very excited for this sweater, since I don't have many sweaters.

(The best reaction came from my roommate, who, as I was describing BGK's totally awesome approach to plus-size knitting, gave me a horrified look and said, "But you're not a plus size!" Oh yes I am, darling, and I'm not ashamed, either. I like my curves; I like feeling like I have substance. Not to mention I actually get to enjoy food this way.)

I flew into this sweater, doing the fastest knitting I think I've ever done. I got the yarn on Thursday, and yesterday the sweater looked like this:



The armhole shaping seems to defy my ability to count, but I started on the sleeve so that I could have something relatively mindless to work on during class. I really want to wear this sweater before it gets too warm. (Which, the way the weather is going, means I've got at least three months to finish it.)

That was the planned purchase. And then... today happened.

I walked into the yarn store with the intention of getting some of the sale sock yarn I had seen when I got the sweater. The sock yarn bin was gone, so I skimmed through the other things, thinking maybe I would see a skein of something really interesting. I wandered past some ribbon and some silk, and then.

Then.

From across the store: a sunshiny yellow.

I sprinted over to it, the happiest color of yarn I have ever seen in my life. In the middle of a blizzard, I needed some sunshine. I picked it up and fondled it a little bit. I tell you, I could feel the sunshine oozing out of the fiber. I was in a trance. I picked it up and took it home and made it my pet.



...along with several of its brothers and sisters.



It's a good thing I only had cash on me, because if I had had plastic, I would have gotten the other five balls. (Hey, it was clearance yarn- $4 a ball! How could I resist that?) It's a good thing the roads are snowy and awful, or I might have gone back to get the rest of them. I've never experienced a yarn like this before- I didn't even stop to think, just picked up all the yarn I could afford and took it to the counter. No second thoughts. No project in mind. Just absolute bliss in my fibery trance.

Now what will I do with 800 yards of sunshiny yellow yarn?

Maybe I'll just fondle it for a while.

Emergency winter knitting

It is absolutely freezing cold here, so cold that the local TV stations are running school closings at the botton of the screen, and I haven't seen them repeat in more than ten minutes. Every sensible school has called things off, since there's been a wind chill advisory, you can get frostbite in minutes, and nobody wants students out walking in that kind of weather- except our lovely university. Since I was out walking in the -20 and more wind chill today, and I didn't have a hat or a scarf, I needed to crank out some FO's, very fast.

Look, an FO!


I finished this guy last night, so it was ready to wear today, and I managed not to lose my ears to frostbite. It's a double-knit hat in what my semantics prof calls "patriotic" colors. Nice and thick, and...

Reversible. Isn't double knitting great? That folded-up part is the best, because it makes the fabric quadruple thick over my ears and forehead, where I need it most.

Next up: the dishcloth. This is so boring there's no point in taking pictures of it. It's just a super thick garter stitch washcloth, made as a hint for a housemate and said housemate's egg-coated frying pan. I finished it to be able to say I had finished something, and together with the acquisition of my soon-to-be job and the completion of last semester's coursework- finally- I had an excuse to celebrate by buying some yarn for a scarf.



Mmm, Manos. The colorway is mulled wine:



That's what I had on Friday, and today I had this:



Leftovers on the head of the Yarn Guardian.

No, really, the spider is the Yarn Guardian. He was a gift from my friend the Peony in the aftermath of a moth scare. See, his tag proves it:



(Too fuzzy? It says "I am the Yarn Guardian. I eat moths!")

Oh, what else did the Manos turn into? This:



Check out the awesomeness: It's a reversible cabled scarf. I was knitting away during Knitty Gritty on Thursday, when Lily Chin was on, and she uttered the magic words: Reversible cables. I about snapped my neck, I looked up so fast. Cables that look the same on both sides? Who ever heard of such a thing?

I wasn't sure I was going to have enough. I got two hanks, ostensibly of 135 yards each, but when I got done with the first one I had a little less than what I considered to be half a scarf. But either I had invisible gauge changes, or "about 135 yards" isn't a terribly precise measurement, because this is how much difference there was between the two hanks:



That's, like, a foot of knitting. Kind of a big difference. Fortunately, the scarf came out exactly the length I was hoping for, so all in all the Yarn Guardian and I are pleased.



With any luck, all this knitting will help me come through the long walks in the arctic blasts with all my body parts un-frostbitten.

Large, lacy temptation

Over the summer, I made an impulse purchase at my LYS: four skeins of laceweight alpaca/silk blend, in a lovely dusty rose color. I've been looking for the perfect lace shawl pattern ever since, but lately I've done a lot more searching. I'm telling myself I'm not allowed to cast on any more new projects, because 12 WIPs should be enough for anyone, but naturally, as soon as I made that decision the temptation to cast on for a sweater or a shawl tripled. I really, really want to knit a sweater, but I thought maybe I could subdue the large-project hunger with something large, intricate, and lacy.

I was out searching for patterns when I stopped dead in my tracks. Because, of course, I already have something large and lacy (and, conveniently, pink) on the needles. I'd been neglecting it because of an error I couldn't quite fix with my crochet hook, so it sat abandoned until I could summon the strength to either fix it or live with the mistake. I hauled it out the other day, and here's what it looks like now:



A large pink butterfly in the garden. The yarn is Cascade Sierra, a 80% cotton/20% wool blend. Here's the lace pattern, spread out (indoors this time- 20% wool isn't enough to protect a shawl from January temperatures for very long):



The completed non-trivet wanted in on the glamor shot action.



All this knitting seems not to have had much of an impact on my stash count, however- I have finished off exactly one ball of yarn this week. I've made sizable dents in some others, but I can't change the stash count yet. Maybe with the next non-trivet.

It's a what now?

My semantics prof has always taken an unusual interest in the stuff I'm knitting. It's not all that unusual for a professor to comment about my knitting, since I knit during my classes, but this particular professor tries to guess the identity of every project I bring to class. (I think he secretly wants to be a knitter.) Today he took a look at this:

and asked if I was making a trivet.

No, I said.

A what? I thought.

It turns out that some people, when they have to put hot dishes on the table, don't use a potholder. They use a trivet. If I were going to make a trivet, I think I would make it out of something thicker than sock yarn, but maybe the squareness of the thing just threw him off.

The non-trivet is, of course, the beginnings of another piece for the Sock Cabin Stashghan. I've been knitting on this almost exclusively since I started it- the log cabin thing is seriously adddictive- and here's what I've got so far:

Modelled by the capable husband. (Is there an official name for this kind of pillow? I get such strange looks when I call it a husband.)

I like the squares by themselves well enough, but I'm not really sure how they're going to look when I put them together. I'm trying to tell myself I don't care, and it's half true, but I do wonder about it from time to time.

When I started this thing, I was afraid I wasn't going to have enough sock yarn in my stash to get to the end of this blanket, especially because I blasted through lots of small bits on the first square. I now admit the total foolishness of this fear. I have not actually finished off a ball of yarn since the inside of the first square, and it occurs to me that this could be an enormous blanket by the time I've used up even a reasonable amount of the sock yarn stash. And the thought of all that blanket that lies ahead of me is enough to send me scrambling for the knitting. Clearly, I have some work ahead of me.

I need to learn to knit faster.

The new obsession

Puppy wants to do the big reveal of the new WIP; he's pretty excited!



Look! Look!
It's a log cabin from leftover sock yarn!



I do so love log cabin knitting. I don't know why. I know that huge amounts of garter stitch should be painfully boring, but it's not. It's great. No decreases, no purling, no worrying about color changes. You just pick a side, pick up some stitches, and go- no worries, no planning, just yarn and knitting. Very zen.

This is what grew out of that swatch-sized bit from yesterday; I've been knitting on it all day. I have since discovered that I have a burning need to knit more socks, so that their leftovers can be incorporated into the blankie. And those socks should be anklets, so that there's more yarn left over. Actually, I have discovered that I am sorely tempted to forgo the sock part altogether and convert my sock yarn stash into one large light-weight blankie.

And yes, blankie, not blanket. This thing is for me, and I don't care how weird the color combinations are. It's knitting nostalgia. It's souvenir stash in functional form. I remember fondly each project whose leftovers are in this patch. It's comforting knitting, and I fully expect it to grow into a mostly-grown-up comfort blankie.

Not to say that I'm paying no attention at all to how it looks. I'm trying to plan what happens, now that the stripes are so wide, when self-striping yarn gets worked in. I'll probably make several little blocks, like the one I have now, and put them together.

Puppy wants to model the blankie (and give his owner an excuse to take more gratuitous knitting pictures).



Ah, but what are puppy and owner not quite as excited about?



Weaving in ends. Ah. Every knitter's favorite part. If I were smart, I'd start weaving them in now, but what fun would that be? Besides, I just remembered some sock yarn that has failed to turn into socks four times, and I think it's going to have to go into this blankie...