Oooh! Oooh! Oooh! The Fall 2005 issue of Interweave Knits is on the stands (yes, already), so I was, of course, compelled to immediately buy it.

Alas. It is teh suck as it were. There are a couple of patterns in it that are *almost* tempting, and yet, not. And the rest of it? Meh. At best. Go here and see for yourself.

See? Toldja. Here’s my (abbreviated) thoughts project by project:
Brioche Helmet Hat – probably one of the few things I’ll end up making.
Bukly Brioche Raglan – Um, no. Too bulky, too long, too heavy, too something.
Cable Cascade Pullover – Oooh! A super warm butthugger! Not. Good.
Rib & Cable Socks – Yet another perfectly acceptable but not exciting sock pattern.
Cabled Shrug – You could drive a tractor up those sleeves. Nothing about this one looks practical or really wearable.
Canteen Bag – Again: eh. Another felted purse. Yawn.
Chenille Cutaway Jacket – I kind of like the lines of this one. Kind of. Hate chenille, though, so it’s hard for me to look past that and see it in something more wearable.
Drop Stitch Cardigan – Big fat EH. Looks like something you’d find in Knitter’s or InKnits. Chunky! Fast! Shapeless!
Felted Floral Collar – Um, wtf? Would anyone actually wear this thing? Seriously? Yes, felting is all the rage right now, as are those god-awful capelets, but please. Puh-LEEZE. (the model, on the other hand, is all kinds of cute)
Weekend Getaway Satchel – Surprise, surpise, more felted stuff. Almost cute, but weird, impractical, difficult to get your crap in and out of shape. Alas.
Greek Pullover – Another of the ‘close but not quite’ pieces. I kind of like it, I kind of don’t. Maybe if I were 6′ tall and flat chested it would appeal more. Not sure.
Braided Blues – Weirdly shaped – the sleeves look really narrow, and the body looks really long. Not a look that works on the human body, really. Beyond that, it’s fine. Not great, not ‘oh my god I need to make that’ wonderful, just whatever.
Union Square Market Sweater – Another ‘close but not quite’ sweater. I kind of like the neckline, but know it probably wouldn’t work on me. I loathe bell sleeves more than almost anything, but that’s just a personal issue. They work on a lot of people, just not me. No way no how. I probably won’t end up making this one either.
Veste Everest – It’s a vest. I don’t do vests. ‘Nuff said.
Blissful Jacket – Um… No. Nothing appealing about that one at all.
Fair Isle Hoodie & Cardigan – Oh dear god no. No no no no no. Run away. Run away! Gah. The stuff bad dreams are made of. Right up there with clowns. In fact…
Vintage Inspired Jacket – GAH. The original piece that this was modelled after was WONDERFUL. As a knit jacket it Does. Not. Work. And the Beyond The Basics article that follows? Have you read her book about designing knitwear? No? Take that article and stretch it out to a couple hundred pages and you’ve got the idea. Yes? Then you’ve heard all this before and really probably don’t care how she swatches a billion times. There’s no useful design information there to speak of, really. Yes, color and texture and interesting edgings. How about structure, kids? We’d like some of that.
Textured Coat – BWAH HA HA HA HA! Oooh! Lumpy! Tres chic!
Essential Indulgence – Another one that I kind of almost like, but… not enough to make, methinks. Alas.
Suede Vest – This is a joke, right? Really. Why on earth would anyone make this? It’s horrendous. Skinny little top part with extra hip-widening action! Could she look any worse? She’s so cute, and yet this makes her look excessively misshapen. Tragic. Absolutely tragic.
Fair Isle Skirt – Eh. Almost cute, but… I’m thinking that unless you’re a size 4 or smaller this would be a terrible mistake to apply to your ass. I could be wrong, but I’m thinking it would make anyone look a LOT wider than they really are.
Fur Trimmed Wrap – Another terrible waste of cashmere. Cashmere and fake fur novelty yarn should never, ever, under any circumstances be used in the same project. Ever. Ditch the evil novelty yarn trim and it might work. Might.

And, people, please. The poncho thing? Let’s go over it one more time. They were ugly in the 70’s, they’re ugly now. Clear? Ok. So stop already. Please.

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Holy crap! It actually fits! And she didn’t outgrow it before she got it. Will wonders never cease?

Here’s the sproglet IN her Rogue. Not bad for having kid-measured measurements and winging the gauge to get it small enough to fit her.

From the front (note the lovely 2-sizes too big pants that are still too short, not that you can see that part, but that’s why the pants are soooo baggy):

And from the side, with the hood up:

I’m all kinds of happy about it, and she totally loves it. w00t!

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Since I’m way too tired to even try to think of anything even mildly witty to say about anything right now, I’ll just give you pictures.

First up, the second Apricot cardi, still not in apricot ‘cos that would look like shit on me. Instead, in basic black cashmere. Revel in my picture taking abilities and the amount of detail you can see here. Woo!

And another view of it, included only because the angle at which it was taken makes it look incredibly vast:

And the promised picture of the fugly roving spun up into some not-so-ugly yarn, which isn’t *quite* this bright, but I couldn’t get a picture of the actual amount of brightness, so deal:

Followed by one crap-ass picture of the mostly finished sock for Barb’s impending baby:

And, just for kicks, one pic of the chrysalis I found in the garden a couple of weeks ago. It was wiggly when I found it, alas, it wiggles no more:

So there.

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I know, I know. I didn’t even bother to mention that I had started another Apricot, and yet, I did, and I just finished it. It still needs blocking and some buttons, but all the rest is done. In yummy, yummy black cashmere. Damn shame it’s 70 some odd degrees out there right now. And no, y’all aren’t getting a picture of this one yet, ‘cos that would require me to go find a tank top to put on under it, since right now it would be, uh, standard euro knitting magazine style with nipples poking through the eyelets, and while I love y’all, I aint goin’ there, not even for you. Sorry.

I’ll go get some buttons for it and get it blocking, and then I’ll take some pictures of it. Along with the spun-up ugly, and the teeny little sweater that I made for Calli’s little one (which I’m sure she’s outgrown by now, so I’ll start something new and even cuter for her and stockpile this for the next baby girl that comes along). Oh, and there’s a sock too. A teeeeeeny little cable front sock in Koigu.

Yeah, I know… I’ve been all kinds of suckful about the updates lately. Lame as hell, I know. I’m sorry. Tonight I will take pictures. I will I will I will. Might even get them posted tonight. We shall see.

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O’s Rogue is finally done! This project took me entirely too long, all things considered. I think, though, that for fall I’m going to get some Peace Fleece in the same color but the heavier weight and make her another, heavier, larger one. I’m reasonably positive that this one won’t fit her anymore come winter. Sad, but there you have it.

Anyway, some photoz for yer viewin’ pleasure:
All pinned out and blocking:

The hood:

and the grafting on the hood, which turned out better on hers than it did on mine:

I’ll see if I can’t get a picture of her in it before she outgrows it…

And they put the witch in a barrel full of nails and rolled her down the hill. The End.

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*MD is for Mother’s Day in this case, since some of us (who are. not. bitter.) didn’t get to go to that little sheep thing back east. So there.

Where, oh where, shall we start? Hmmm? ooh! Cake! Yes, let’s start with CAKE!

What you can’t quite see is that the sprinkles on top spell out “happy knitting”. The Booger made that and brought it down for me. It’s got everything a cake should have. Cakey goodness, lots of frosting, Teddy Grahams, and sprinkles. Sweet!

The other thing she brought with wasn’t quite so sweet. At least not quite so sweet smelling…

and let me just say that it’s a damn shame that computer monitors aren’t scratch n’ sniff, ‘cos that, my friends, stinks to high heaven.

Stinky up close!

O and I spent about half the day Saturday washing half of that fleece. For size comparison, the tire and bumper you see in the corner there are a full-size Dodge pickup. That fleece is huge. And did I mention the stinky part? We’re pretty sure that one is from one of the Scottish Blackface rams on the island. They’re fairly wild critters, roaming freely in the woods most of the year up there, so the fleece is chock full of vegetable matter and is kind of matted in places. And it stinks.

Decatur has a sizeable herd of sheep going at this point. Most of them are Scottish Black Face, and a few are Dorsets. The annual island sheep shearing was the last weekend in April, and since they just give away all the fleeces, O asked for and got some. Ten of them. TEN. Eesh. That’s a LOT of stinky. She has big plans for all of it, though, so it’s all good.

Speaking of stinky things that come in groups of ten…
Chicklet update!

They’re continuing to grow, and DAMN if they’re not cute anymore. So sad. Chicklet gallery updated with current pix. Enjoy.

And, just to prove that I haven’t totally lost interest in spinning…

That’s spun up from some mystery batts that I got from Franquemont Fibers on eBay. It’s lovely stuff that’s been a joy to spin. And it has sparkly stuff in it, which is a total bonus. No clue what was in the batt, but it’s mostly wool with some other stuff.

There’s been more, I just don’t have pix to show of any of the rest of it. O’s Rogue is coming along – we’re down to one and 2/3 sleeve left. She better not outgrow it before I finish it…

So there. I may not have gotten to go to MS$W, but I had a damn fine MD weekend anyway.

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Eesh.

I’ve been working steadily on a Rogue for Booger, and it’s been kicking my ass. Mostly because I’ve been tired and stressed and not paying enough attention. Hem to armpits went pretty smoothly, and things just went to hell from that point on.

I had finished the front from the armpits up to one of the shoulders, and was starting the other side of the neck when I realized that I had been doing all of the damn decreases backwards, so instead of a smooth line, it was all jaggedy and totally not working for me. So I tore the whole top half of the front out and redid it.

Then, over the weekend, I realized that as I was nearing the top of the hood, where the cable is all fiddly and wide and complicated and you actually have to pay some modicum of attention to the charts, that I had, WAY back down just above where the hood joins the neck, crossed one of the cables the wrong way. ON BOTH SIDES. FFS. So, yeah, you guessed it. RRRRIIIIPPPPP.

I’ve managed to get about half of what I ripped out reknit, carefully checking the damn cable crossings every row to make sure I’m not screwin’ it up again.

And just ‘cos I’m way too lazy to look back through the old posts, just in case I haven’t mentioned the Booger’s Rogue before, she saw mine, and desperately wanted me to make her one. I looked around for the perfect yarn for it for a couple of months, and tried to decide if I wanted to try and do the math to make it smaller in the same gauge as the pattern is written, or if I wanted to make it up in a finer gauge yarn at a smaller gauge. I opted for the finer gauge yarn (Peace Fleece sport weight in Kamchatka Seamoss) and leaving the pattern exactly as written. So far it’s working beautifully, and the test fitting last weekend went well. She was not groovin’ on the texture of the totally unwashed Peace Fleece, until I showed her my Everyday Cardigan that’s been washed a couple of times, and is ohmygod soft.

If I can just keep from screwing anything else up on it, I should have it done by the time she gets down here this weekend. Which would totally rock. Mind you, I was too tired and in too much pain* to do diddly with it either last night or this morning, and haven’t done much of anything since I got home today other than take ibuprofen and a nap, but… yeah, hopefully I can get it done. We’ll see.

*Hugo wasn’t the only one with issues this weekend. I managed to totally hose my back by being an idiot and picking up a VERY heavy basket of laundry by, you guessed it, bending at the waist… Who says stupid doesn’t hurt?

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Again. Finished the second back for the Everyday Cardi last night, and this time it seems to be all the same color… Yay! I’ll put it together on the ferry this morning and do the collar tonight, then it will be ready to wear, just in time for the weather to skyrocket right into the 70’s…

Damn. That’s almost too much excitement for one day. Better leave it at that and go to work or somethin’.

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Yeah, I didn’t think so. Not that I’m *eating* that combination, mind you, but that’s what’s going to be hanging off my knitting tonight when I get home. Yee haw! I love me some Amyville, yes I do.

Today’s box o’ Amyville goodness included 4 pieces of sushi, a fortune cookie, two pieces of chocolate, two donuts, and a cupcake.

If you don’t have any of her markers yet, hie thee over there and getcherself some! They’re absolutely the best markers EVER. And no, I’m not getting any kind of kickbacks from her, I’m just an Amyville junkie. But I can quit any time I want to. I can. Yes. I. Can. I just don’t want to yet.

I’ll post some pix as soon as I’ve got the lacy goodness cast on and all markered up. Promise.

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(warning, profanity to ensue, not that it’s particularly necessary to warn y’all about that, since you probably all know I’m a total pottymouth at this point, but whatever, some delicate flower may stumble upon this post and be all freaked out, so there you go. you’ve been warned.)

AAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!! Let’s just start there.

A while back I got a bunch of (oh my god yummy) yarn from Peace Fleece, including 6 skeins of Zarya Fog in dyelot #7902. Of which I’ve been working on their Everyday Cardigan. Since my blocking space is limited, I washed and blocked the fronts and the back last night, so they could be dry by the time I finished the second sleeve, and I’d have room to block both of the sleeves at the same time.

I got up this morning and went to take them off the blocking board… The fronts? They look great. See:

But the back?… What. The. FUCK.

See where I changed skeins? Yeah, I do too. Fucking hell. And the orangey/brown blotchiness? Where the fucking hell did that come from? And no, it doesn’t wash out. Tried that.

So, yeah. NOT happy about that. Not sure what I’m going to *do* about that. CritterBoy says it’s fine, that I’m just being hypersensitive and that nobody would ever notice either thing. Meh. I know they’re there. Therefore, it must be fixed. Shit. shitshitshitshitshit.

BUGGER.

On a brighter note, peep#3 has hatched and is doing well. Last week’s peeps are growing nicely, and have started to get their cheek tufts and some sort of top o’ the head tuftiness too. Lord only knows what they’re going to look like when they’se all growed up. The other four? Not so cute anymore. No, really. What, you don’t believe me? Here;

and we can’t have a pic like that without some cute to balance it out:

Awwwwwwww! Them’s good eatin’!*

No, I have no intention of actually eating them. It just seemed like the thing to say…

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Ok! Ok! I finally did it. Found the battery charger for the camera and charged up the battery. And now we have pictures. Several of them. Yay. Woo. Nope, sorry, can’t muster any more excitement today. Lame, but whatterya gonna do?

So. I really have been productive, I just haven’t done much in the way of talkin’ about it or takin’ pix of it. But, I’ve got pictures now, so here goes, in no particular order:

The cabled sweater I did for Denise’s new baby Owen:

and a close up of the same:

Today’s chickens brought to you by CritterBoy and the letter L:

Here they are in the bag they came home from the feed store in.
And here they are individually:




And here they are all together in their temporary home (until they’re big enough to go outside)

They will be some varieties of bantam whence they’ve growed they’selves all up. We’re hoping for more bobble-headed ones, but we’ll just have to wait and see. None of these three have names yet, so please, leave suggestions! The names we’ve already gone through with the others: General Tso, Lemon, Noodle, Sesame, Garlic, and The Nuggets (a matching set of bobble heads that weren’t with us long since they both turned out to be boys and we live in the city). We also have a Silkie whom, for whatever reason, has never been named. She’s just “the silkie”.

Here we have the Lorna’s Laces roving that Penny got me from Threadbear for xmas:

And here is a chunk of it all predrafted (it’s wonderful to spin, but doesn’t draft easily)

Here it is partially spun up on the Joy

And the first skein, navajo plied:

The Interlacements silk roving that I got at Woodland Woolworks when I was down in Oregon a couple weeks ago all spun up:

My first go at intarsia-in-the-round. Front, then back:

And finally, the front of our friend Squagel’s car when he was foolish enough to leave it with The Boy for three weeks while he was off enjoying New Zealand. This will probably only be funny to the geek/gamer contingent among you:

For the rest of the pics of his car, all stickered up, you can go here. The carebears are an Eve reference…

There you have it. The update. In pictures.

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I got an email today from a long-lost friend of mine! I had run into her down at OFFF this past summer, but somehow had managed to lose every, single business card that I came home with, including the one with her (very unlisted) phone number on it. Waaaahhh! Turns out that the evening after we left she discovered that the Booger had won the Kid’s Gift Basket, so she had picked it up for us, figuring that we’d be talking in the following week…

But, this morning, there was email from her, and we’ll be getting together on Sunday. AND! And and and and and – she is working Sundays at a LYS that I’ve been dying to go check out, and
Sunday is the drop-in day for spinners and knitters and they have a perfect cashmere spindle AND I have to go into the city on Sunday ANYWAY, sooooo not only do I get to hang out with her on Sunday and spin, but I get to do it at a well-stocked little LYS! Woot!

On top of all of this, I just found out that work is kicking everyone out at 3 today, so I get to go pick up the kidlet and work more on the Apricot jacket while waiting in the endless pre-holiday weekend ferry line. But I’m ok with that. Yes indeed.

Here’s hoping that the rest of the birthday weekend will continue to be this good!

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Which is why I haven’t posted in, like, forever, y’know?

But really, I’ve been busy! I swear! See? Look!

First off, we have the super-oh-my-god-these-are-girly socks:

followed by… yeah, suckage – the hole that I managed to tear in the toe of one of them while visiting the rest of the Beavers in Portland last weekend:

(I can fix that, though)

And then, the super-fabulous Elizabeth Collar that I made for myself:

and the one I made for O when she saw mine in progress and DESPERATELY wanted one:

Followed by the socks that I’m making for someone special for the holidaze (I’m gettin’ PAID for this pair, kids, can you believe that???)

and then, MAGNETS! A bajillion magnets! Yee-haw! See folks? my entire life doesn’t really revolve around knitting! You doubted! You mocked! HA! I showed you!

So. There you have it. And now, I truly must get back to the knitting. I have a mere 5 days to finish the sox above and the other project, which I can’t take a picture of ‘cos the person it’s for might see it. Sigh.

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For all the (generally sweet and good-natured) teasing The Boy does about my knitting and spinning, he totally threw me for a loop this past Friday night. We hooked up with some friends of ours while we were all up in Vancouver this weekend, and as we walked out of the bar he said to me: “here, give me that for a second” indicating my coat, which I was about to put on over my Rogue. Trusting soul that I am, I handed it over, even though it was raining (lightly).

At that point he says to our friends “I’d just like to point out the insane amount of talent and skill that went into this sweater she’s wearing (turning me around and pointing out all of the cable work) … and the pocket, which was my idea, and, and, and… “. The friends were suitably impressed, and I ’bout fell over dead. Who knew he’d not only noticed the sweater, but actually cottoned to the work and time that went into it? And the fact that he was impressed enough to Point It Out??? Yeah, he’s a keeper.

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After a thoroughly unproductive Friday and Saturday, I made all kinds of progress on several projects yesterday. This, above all else, made me feel good about the impending holidays. Whew!

I should have Barb’s Bella pullover done tonight, and can then get crackin’ on Tony’s sox, the F-man’s stocking, the hat for D (still even have to spin up the alpaca for that one…), and whatever else is in the stack that I still have to get done. But progress has been made! I no longer feel as though the holiday knitting is hopeless!

And, of course, once the holiday knitting is done, I can get started on Cute Baby Stuff for the soon-to-be-beavers! Hooray for cute baby knitting!

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