I love my cats, but.....

....not when an unnamed cat throws up all over my Rockin' Sock Club binder! After getting up with The Toddler who woke up early due to a leaky diaper, I came downstairs to find the puke mess. Lesson #1: Don't leave your RSC binder where a cat can get to it. Lesson #2: Be thankful that the binder wipes off easily.

It's 8:00 AM on a Sunday morning. Can I get a do-over?

Can you O.D. on Socks that Rock?

Warning: Rockin' Sock Club SPOILER AHEAD!


I've been running around like Cornholio all morning because I received not one but two packages from Blue Moon Fiber Arts.



No, this isn't all mine! After sorting out what Lisa and Michelle ordered, I was left with this.


The Lightweight: Gingerbread Dude, Flower Power, KawKaw, Downpour, Jubilation, and Oma Desala


The Mediumweight: Treehugger, Oregon Clover Honey (which I don't even remember ordering, so my subconscious must have clicked the button), Rook-y, and Rauen.


The September Rockin' Sock Club: Tide Pooling!

It's all I can do not to cast on for anything new, but I'm making myself finish up at least three WIPs first!

More Go Get Your Jacket

Me again, this time on the beloved February Lady Sweater. I guess I should, uh, finish mine already.

I loves the green

I was kitchnering up (is that a word) my Spring Forwards in Smooshy in the Happy Forest colorway and realized I have an awful lot of green sock yarn.





And yet somehow, when I shop, I seem to forget that I have all this green sock yarn at home and immediately pick up the green again. Really, who has this many green socks? Anyone else have a strange fascination with a colorway that you'd never wear in a store-bought sock?

I forgot to say

I have a drive-by posting on Go Get Your Jacket on "political crochet."

I can haz Ravelry bag?

It's official. I am a knitting bag whore. I've been waiting for months to be at the right place at the right time to score a Ravelry Knitting bag (to the point where Lisabee and I were stalking Very Important Founders of Ravelry last May at Md Sheep and Wool to find out how to get them) and mine finally arrived this morning.

This makes

• one prized Jordana Paige bag
• one floral bag purchased at Handmade Arcade last year
• one huge Md Sheep and Wool bag
• one bag from the old Pittsburgh Knit and Bead
• one sock monkey bag from the Chewy Spaghetti Blue Plate Special Club
  
• one plain old tote from Target that was supposed to be The Toddler's beach bag

And despite those seven bags, I still coveted and desired a customer's beautiful Namaste bag at the store last week. I need help.

Mama's work? Yarn? Buy it?

In other words, The Toddler is explaining that he went to Natural Stitches to choose the yarn for his Tomten jacket. The Toddler is still a fan of The Opinionated Knitter, and keeps leafing through it, chanting "red sweater? red sweater?" So I had my husband bring him in at the end of my shift yesterday so he could see all the reds for himself.

I told him he could choose his red yarn, and he replied "Hmmm," putting his finger to his lips and looking carefully at the yarn. He pointed out various cottons, saying "This is coot [cute]. This is a red one. This is a purple one." I don't know where he got the cute remark; I'm thinking he's been shopping with my sister. But for those of you looking for educational opportunities for your small children, a yarn store is a great place to talk about colors.

His choice, after a consultation with the staff of Natural Stitches and one black bunny visiting for the afternoon, is Cascade 220 Superwash Handpaints in the "cherry pie" colorway, a vibrant mix of reds. I think it will be a lot of fun to knit up as I tackle another Elizabeth Zimmermann pattern.

Top-Down Tuesday

I put the finishing touches on three children's gifts last week, all knit from the top-down. I am loving making garments this way, and I think it will be rare if I ever make a sweater from the bottom up with seams ever again, with so many great alternative construction methods out there.

Girlfriend's Swing Coat Sweater, made for a new (well, not so new now) big sister in Cascade Sierra, a cotton/wool blend. Cute, cute, cute. I want a grown-up version for me.

This Super-Natural Stripes was knit for her baby brother in three shades of Blue Sky Alpaca Organic Cotton, which is my absolute new favorite cotton to knit with.


And finally, this Mossy Jacket for Miss Corinne, made with Malabrigo Merino Worsted.


The last two patterns come from f.pea's free pattern fridays, and while I don't want to diss the patterns because they are so cute and I am thrilled with the final result, I do want to give a heads up to newer knitters. Remember: free blog patterns haven't always been test-knitted to the extent that patterns for sale are (or at least should be) and there might be typos in the stitch counts, or instructions may not be as clear as you'd like them to be. I ran across a few glitches in these two patterns, but because I understood top-down construction, they weren't a problem for me.

I had a pretty relaxing holiday weekend full of knitting. I worked Saturday and Monday at the store, and learned an important lesson: don't rearrange and fluff the pretty alpaca roving when you're wearing black pants! Sunday I got together with a few of my knitting peeps, where I learned another valuable lesson: don't drink too much coffee when casting on for a top down sweater or you might forget to mark for something important, oh say, a shoulder. Since The Toddler is not a World War I veteran, I had to frog the whole thing and start over so he'd have two good arms in his new sweater. Hope everyone else had a nice weekend!

Tomten?

Is anyone -- particularly the moms of The Toddler's real life toddler peeps -- interested in doing a Tomten Jacket KAL? Since The Toddler asked for a "wed one" [ahem, red] after perusing Elizabeth Zimmermann's The Opinionated Knitter, I've been studying the pattern and thinking of yarn possibilities. I don't have enough thick red worsted in my stash but at work today, I considered:

this Merino 5 Print



or this Cascade 220 Superwash Paint


My other idea is to wait until the new shipment of Dream in Color Classy comes in and hope for some Lipstick Lava (and hope that the batch we get doesn't look this pink).


Thoughts? Anyone else in?

I must be doing something right

I sat down last night to start a Baby Surprise Jacket for Levi, and to my great surprise and delight, The Toddler abandoned Go Dog, Go, and The Little Engine That Could and became enthralled with Elizabeth Zimmermann's The Opinionated Knitter. He loved it! He pointed out all the babies and the mamas and the dadas and the grandmas. He talked about all the colors of the sweaters in the pictures. He asked for a red sweater after seeing the Tomten jackets, so I guess I have to find some red yarn. I had to pry him away from the book so he could take a bath. I'm just tickled to death that he enjoyed it so much.

I'm whipping through some socks and finishing up some baby gifts this week. Just a reminder, if you have entered the Summer of Socks and Lace contests at Natural Stitches, the deadline to bring your projects to the store to be weighed and entered is this Monday, Labor Day. I'll be there Saturday and Monday, and I'm looking forward to seeing all the entries.

Picking myself back up

I'm not part of the Ravelry Olympics, but I cast on for these Spring Forward socks on Friday night as I watched the opening ceremonies of the 2008 games. The yarn is the July selection of the Rockin' Sock Club -- these are really not my colors, but I'm enjoying the yarn and making peace with the blue spiral pooling, which seems is what the yarn wants to do. It's a fast, fast knit and the lace is easy to memorize and read as you go.

As for my online silence, well, all I can say is that it was so much worse after all. We've been battling moths of all kinds for weeks, and I've lost a lot of finished objects and some stash. The upside is that it's really, really made me reconsider my yarn buying habits (yes, again) and I realized that I need to enjoy what I have. Yet I wouldn't wish this on my worst knitting nemesis, if I had a knitting nemesis, that is. Wish us luck in getting rid of this problem for good. I'm already on a first name basis with half the employees of Terminex already!

Bibs

Hey, more about Mason-Dixon Crack, I mean, baby bibs, in today's Go Get Your Jacket.

It could have been soooo much worse, I guess

We had a bug infestation in our rice recently (lesson learned: those big bags of rice Costco aren't such a good deal after all; better to buy small quantities and keep them stored in glass containers). So that made me a teensy bit paranoid about my stash, and I decided to take a look yesterday.

It's a good thing I did. No, my stash hasn't been eaten through entirely, but I was forced to confront The Shame of My Stash. See, long ago, before my wedding even, I bought a very expensive Colinette AbFab Throw kit at the height of their popularity. If you remember those, you remember how expensive they were. Anyway, I bought it and then abandoned the project about six inches into it. I know, I know. I never even entered it into my Ravelry Stash or Project page. I just stuffed it in its original plastic bag in the bottom of my cupboard and pretended it didn't exist. Guess which plastic bag had a hole in it? Guess which project had the tell-tale signs of, gulp, moths, on one of the skeins of yarn?

To my credit, I didn't freak out. I brushed off the visible moth....stuff outside, put the offending project in a new plastic bag, sealed it, and put it in Time Out in the deep freezer in the basement. The rest of my stash appears to be unharmed. I vacuumed the living daylights out of the stash cupboard, put in a ton of cedar blocks, and made sure everything was securely packaged in ziplocks. The sweater quantities are okay. The Precious Sock Yarns are tightly wrapped and then stored in plastic boxes with snap-on lids. I think it will all be all right. I hope.

A knitter's rite of passage

Was it Debbie Bliss who admonished that handknits can be absolutely ruined by a poor choice of button? Whoever it was, I totally took that to heart, and so projects that are otherwise finished languish in my knitting bag because I haven't found the best, 100% most perfect button for them. Thus, I've had this Baby Surprise Jacket all but done for weeks and weeks until finally, I sucked it up and picked out buttons at regular old Jo-Ann Fabrics.

It's not bad for a first attempt at an Elizabeth Zimmermann pattern (even though I totally used a spreadsheet to keep track of where I was on the pattern and sent several desperate, frantic e-mails to poor Michelle who had taken the Baby Surprise class at Natural Stitches). My biggest observation is that I understand why The Yarn Harlot only does the top three buttons, as I think the way the fabric pulls, at least on mine, wants the sweater to be open at the bottom. I didn't do any of the optional finishing work since the garter edges look crisp and tidy. I can definitely see myself doing more of these....spreadsheet in hand, of course.

The yarn, Brooks Farm Solo, was an absolute dream to work with, very soft and squishy and the hand-dyed colors blend beautifully. The DK weight means this is a newborn sized sweater, so I'm not sure if any of the summer babies will be getting this one. The yarn is also not superwash, so it's definitely for someone who knits and understands how to care for natural fibers.

And finally, the yarn is purple and brown. Is that gender neutral? Talk amongst yourselves. I'm going to be doing a blog post for Go Get Your Jacket about gender neutral knitting for children soon, so I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Okay, really, this is out of hand.

New Knitty came out this morning! Usually I see a lot of things I like that I'll queue for later. Now there must be something in the air because I love these socks and want to cast on for them RIGHT NOW. I think part of the appeal is an easily memorized lace pattern (I have three pairs of Boring Socks on the needles right now...come to think of it, the fact that I have three pairs on the needles at the same time is probably a clue I have no business looking at sock patterns just now); part of the appeal is that it's written specifically for Socks that Rock, so it takes the yarn's tendency to pool into account. All my lovely STR from Md Sheep and Wool is calling me...... Must, not. cast. on. Must. not. cast. on.

Work continues on my February Lady Sweater. I've lost count of how many times I've cast on for this, and I'll have to rip and cast on once more, since Version 2.0 came out yesterday. It's definitely worth it, though. I remarked on Ravelry that this is the perfect Liz Lemon sweater: smart, cute, hip without trying to be hip. I can't wait to wear it. And hey, we have a Ravelry Group KAL for the sweater, so come join us! And stop by the store if you're making this because a bunch of us are working on it there as well.

Everyone else is doing it

The February Lady Sweater was in 500-something queues when I saw and queued it this morning. When I got to work and showed it to Kelli, it was at 600-something. By the time Lisa showed up and cast on for it, the number had risen to 777. As of now, 6:00 PM, it's in 937 queues. Is this some kind of new record?

Natural Stitches had a run today of Dream In Color Classy because of this sweater. I bought some In Vino Veritas for my Lady Sweater; Lisa bought Dusky Aurora for hers. And then! We got to meet PAKnitWit from Ravelry, who brought in her socks to be measured for our Summer of Socks contest; she took one look at the pattern and bought some DIC for her own green Lady Sweater. We love to enable. It's a KAL after all!

As if the Startitis weren't bad enough

Jeez. I love to start projects, but I rarely see big projects, like sweaters, that make me shriek and exclaim "I must cast on for that RIGHT NOW." Usually I need to ruminate on them, look at the patterns for awhile, see how other people interpret them, think carefully about yarn choice, etc. etc. etc.

Until today.

I logged onto Ravelry and hit my "Friend Activity" tab, which is seriously greater than Facebook and Myspace and all those other things put together, and saw an adaptation of Elizabeth Zimmermann's February Baby Sweater on Two Needles for grownups in, like, five other people's queues. It's the February Lady Sweater!

I need yarn. It's a good thing I work at a LYS. It's a good thing I work in a LYS today, like in an hour. Anyone up for a KAL?

Srsly? My knitting has gotten away from me

Okay, srsly? How many WIPs are on that sidebar over there? I have to finish a lot of those for gifts in the next few weeks, plus I need to start another gift for a baby who should be here any day now. And I haven't even started any of my Rockin' Sock Club projects. And yet this morning I had a hankering to cast on ANOTHER project: The Everlasting Bagstopper from Knitty. I need more market bags. More importantly, I need to do something, anything with the humungous storage container of Sugar and Cream and Peaches and Creme from my days of the Mason-Dixon Bib and Warshrag Crackwhore Period, and wouldn't this be a great way to use some of it up?

I think, no, I know this is the worst case of Startitis I have ever had. Help.

Knitting for children

I've been "invited" to be a guest blogger for a new blog, Go Get Your Jacket, in which a bunch of us take a step back and scrutinize the clothes, gear, and stuff in general that we buy for our small children. I've done a few entries so far, but I thought readers of this blog would be interested in my first of a planned series of posts about knitting for children.

Speaking of color

WARNING: ROCKIN' SOCK CLUB SPOILER AHEAD




The latest shipment of Socks that Rock certainly didn't skimp on the color. The colorway studies continue, this time in purple.



Check out my Flickr photostream for better pictures. I love this and was saddened to read in the Dyer's Notes that this is probably the last color study for the club this year.