What I Did Instead

I should be working on the Ginkgo Crescent shawlette.

I have the pattern.

I have the needles.

I have the yarn.

(Madelinetosh Tosh Sock)

Buuuut…

Monday morning I pulled out the yarn to wind it and when I removed the scrap pieces of yarn holding the skein in order I found two bugs! They were larvae of some sort and after a post on ravelry suggested that I freeze my yarn for three days, let it sit for one and then let it freeze for another three.

So instead of working on the shawl I found various other things to do.

I wound the yarn I dyed earlier this week with yellow onion skins and an iron after-mordant.

(The lighter yellow is without a mordant.)

I got caught up on recording temperatures for The Weather Scarf.

I tried to turn a heel on the Bahamas socks and ended up with an extra needle with ten stitches on it when I picked them up after finishing the sole flap.

Seriously, who does that?

Upon closer inspection I realized that, not only do I have no idea where those extra stitches came from or how to eliminate them, they are too mall in various places, the heel being one. So,  I frogged it and started over, making a medium instead of a small.

I worked on a sister to the Stevedore hat. It is only slightly different. I’m using the Alpaca yarn I bought in Gettysburg last summer. I’m calling her Stevedora.

I bought the hair ties I needed for Flower Power (AKA Tiny Tether) and a set of pacifiers.

Apparently you can only buy a 72 pack of these suckers at Wal-Mart and apparently they make different sized pacifiers for different ages. I bought some for age 16 months. I’m going to go back and get some smaller ones I think.

I did a lot of things other than the thing I wanted to do but I still got a lot done.

Fifth Annual Blogging Week

You may or may not remember last year when I joined the Fourth Annual Blogging Week, hosted by the wonderful Eskimimi Makes. It’s a week of posts on various topics.  She describes it as:

Once a year knitters and crocheters that blog are invited from all over the world to take part in a community blog week in which they are presented with a number of topics to blog about over the period of seven days. The topics are very flexible and can be interpreted in many ways, so there is a good deal of variety in the posts that this inspires, which then provide wonderful reading for anyone who enjoys reading the blogs that it inspires.

I had a lot of fun and was able to participate almost every day. If you would like to read those posts click below.

Day One

Day Two

Day Three

Day Four

Days Five, Six and Seven

Why am I telling you all about this? Well, it’s that time again. Eskimimi has announce that the Fifth Annual Blogging Week will start on May twelfth.

She has posted the tags and topics already. If you wish to join click on the blog link I posted above for more information (you might have to scroll down a bit). I leave the topics a secret so those who simply want to follow along will be surprised. Of course, if you decide to join please leave a comment down below so I can check out your blog, if I am not already doing so.

Thought it Wasn’t Thursday

What with Easter break started and a little spare time on my hands I decided I would try something new. I have seen W.I.P. Wednesdays before but I have never participated in one. I thought it would be fun to participate. Then I realized, it’s not Wednesday. Would you like to see what I’m working on anyway? I thought so.

The first Bahama Sock (AKA Turkish Walrus by: Rachel Brown) has reached the sole flap (part of the heel). I’ve been really enjoying the monotony of these socks. With the adaptations I’ve made there is minimal striping. That makes it a good TV project.

I ended up adding an extra two inches to Flower Power (AKA Tiny Tether by: Katie Franceschi) which brings the stem length to six inches. I added two more leaves and wove in all the ends except for those that I’ll need to attach the clip and the elastic. I count it as a WIP because it doesn’t have the pacifier, elastic of clip attached yet.

Blurred Lines

In the two-and-a-half years I have been blogging here I have always tried to keep my personal life separate from my knitting life. I use pseudonyms for nearly everyone and I don’t stray much from talking about knitting (who would want to though?). Last week, however, those lines blurred. My knitting was featured in the creative issue of my school’s newspaper. They were all patterns I designed and they were published under my real name.

I thought about adding my web address but decided against it. I do want this world to stay separate from my classmates. You can see the editor picked Bow Wow Beanie, E-String, Strawberry Mittens and a skein of the alpaca/silk blend I spun way back when. I was pleasantly surprised that she picked as many pictures as she did.

I started the gift for my friend whose wife is expecting a baby in August. The shower is in May though, so I thought I better get started. First, I knit up a tiny tether (from Knitty.com). The picture is kind of dark and blurry. It looks better if you squint. 🙂

the stem is about four inches long and to knit it up probably only took a few hours all together. It just doesn’t seem long enough so, I’m going to frog the flower and add another inch to the stem. I figure it’ll be pretty useful to have some way to hold onto a pacifier and keep it close to the baby. I also sent the rabbit, which I named Radish due to his coloring, to Rosie. Her little sister, Daisy, was born earlier this month and looks just like her.

He really isn’t that crooked in real life. He’s just very floppy. He turned out much better than the bear I made for her first birthday.

Resolution Recap #3

I’ve been way behind this month. I only got in about three weeks-worth of squares. I didn’t really knit on anything else after my last post. Life just been that brand of crazy that has me mixing up names with reckless abandon (seriously, it was bad yesterday). When I get stressed and busy I might call you by my great aunt’s name and you’re actually one of my coworkers. Ooops. Anyway, I waited until I had the weather scarf caught up before I posted. That’s why this month’s recap is a little late.

You can start to see the color transition from the dreary colors to the brighter, prettier ones.  April already requires a new color, purple. I think the final transition into spring has at least started. Hey, I head peepers on Thursday, anything is possible.

Since my computer didn’t want to cooperate I’ll just type the statistics down here. The coldest day was March third with a balmy sixteen degrees Fahrenheit. That’s about negative nine degrees Celsius. The warmest day was March thirty-first at forty-nine degrees. About nine degrees Celsius, positive this time.

0-10 degrees F: White

11-20 degrees F: Black

21-30 degrees F: Grey

31-40 degrees F: Dark Blue

41-50 degrees F: Green

51-60 degrees F: Purple

61-70 degrees F: Pink

71-80 degrees F: Teal

81-90 degrees F: Yellow

91-100 degrees F: Orange

101-110 degrees F: Red

(Temperatures are based on the average for the day.)

The blanket suffered this month. I just haven’t had enough time to work on it. It still grew though.

From this to…

this. This month I ran out of my green camo yarn.

The last square was a big one. I really wanted to make a big one with this yarn, it just looked good with the surrounding yarn colors. I knew that, in the past, it had created a very thin fabric though so I doubled up the yarn. You can see the color change between the single strand knit square in the bottom left corner of the picture and the big one. I just barely had enough to finish the square. All that was left was the tail.

This month I knit a square out of the yarn I dyed with blueberries this summer for the first time. I’m still a little worried about the dye being color-fast even though I used a salt fixative. I’ve kept it hidden away at the bottom of the my box holding all my yarns for this project. It seemed to need another purple in it though, (more purple is always an option) so I took a leap of faith and knitted with it. So far so good.

On another note I  see that a blogger I have been following for a while now has started a blanket of her own. I can’t wait to see how it turns out!