Wrap up

I had to go to a meeting at the hospital on Wednesday, so it was The Gambler who rescued picked up Somerset from the penitentiary vet hospital. He said that she was meowing non-stop all the way home, but the second her cage made it across our threshold she started purring. When I did get home, she made strange for a minute or 2, but then remembered me. Since then, she's been an almost permanent fixture on the couch beside us. She is her usual sweet self, and is eating better than before she went into the hospital. The only external sign of anything having been done is the patch behind her right shoulder where they shaved her fur to do an ultrasound of her heart (she's got a benign heart murmur). She hasn't demonstrated any new Spider Cat super powers (yet.) Greedo is relieved that all is right with the world again; when we came back from watching a movie Thursday, he wasn't sitting in the front window waiting for us. **************************** The wrap ended up taking 2 months and 7 days to knit. I'd hoped to finish it before my Wednesday SnB, but when I picked it up that morning, something wasn't right: I had mucked up the 4th to last square. The problem was that at this point, I was only checking the pattern to see how many rows before a colour change, and what colour came next. So I missed the instructions to cast on 12 stitches. It was easy enough to fix - I just ripped out that square and re-knit it. By the end of the SnB, I was on my last square. I was to tired to stay up long enough to finish it, so I finished it yesterday morning. Of course, I have some ends to deal with:It's not as bad as it looks - I wove in most of the ends as I knitted it - I'd estimate that 90% of the ends just need to be trimmed. I decided to block it first for 2 reasons: 1) Blocking it with wires seemed like a cinch compared to dealing with ends (especially since The Gambler was able to help me slide the wires through the edges stitch by stitch). 2) I thought it would be better to weave the ends in with the fabric "stretched out"; hopefully this way I can avoid having ends showing through. I am going to try to hide the ends in the "seams" (where I picked up stitches) as best I can. I have a fair amount of yarn left over. Just to remind you, this was what I started with: It was a nice project, but I was happy to be done with it; I'd consider knitting something similar in the future, but wouldn't do it right away. Now, what to start next?

Rejoice!

Somerset is home! The wrap is complete!! I didn't have to drive in to work today!!!

Can I be excused? My brain is full.

I finished The Feed My Brain Socks before the end of the conference. Their near-identical state is partly luck; it didn't occur to me to specifically start right at a colour change, so I guessed how far in to the lime green I should start - I'm only off by a row or 2. Toe up, hybrid heel, Look-Ma-I-can-knit-without-looking-stockinette; took 2 weeks to knit. It seemed such a waste to have nothing to knit during the last part of the conference, so I cast on for another pair of socks: These are The Stick to Your Ribs Socks - simple 2x2 garter ribbing. I like the way that this stitch pattern works with the colour changes - blends them in a bit more. The yarn is Lana Grossa Meilenweit in the Sunset 8707 colourway. Where does this sock name come from? Well, since every second round is straight stockinette, I have to pay a bit of attention to it to make sure I switch back to a K2P2 row - or else I'll miss the ribs. Ribbing, ribs? Stick to the pattern? Get it? Stick to your... never mind. The sock is probably going to fit more loosely than if it was straight stockinette, so I am hoping to make them a bit longer. My intention was to make The Feed My Brain Socks as long as possible. When I had 53g of yarn left, I switched to the ribbing - I didn't weigh the sock, because I thought the circ would affect the accuracy. I didn't expect to have very much yarn left at all; I made a mental note that the hybrid heel used way more yarn than a short row heel. So imagine my surprise when I finished the second sock: Wait a minute... The skein (I stuck the remaining yarn into one of the socks for the purposes of weighing) was almost 10% underweight! And I was worried about the weight of the circ throwing off my calculations!! Because I had the foresight to a) weigh this new skein before I started, and b) start right at a colour change, I should be able to easily match up the second sock to the first. I hope I'm not tempting the yarn gods to create a Noro-like knot plus colour jump 3/4 of the way through the skein.

Speaking of knitting...

Work continues on the Zephyr Quilt Wrap: I'm a bit more than 75% done - it's portable, but not an ideal purse project - the colour changes (which keep it from being a mind-numbingly boring garter stitch effort) are a little bit finicky, but the biggest problem is that I have to take the stitch marker off at the end of each square, and I don't want to lose it! Work on the Wrap has been interrupted with some small projects: With the weather starting to turn cold, The Gambler needed something for his hands. He approved of the Knucks pattern. I used some Mirasol Hacho that I picked up last year. I had 4 skeins of the same colourway, 2 from one lot and 2 from another. I was quite surprised by the amount of variability in the colours between skeins from the same let, as well as within the skein itself - as you can see above, the blue didn't start showing up regularly until I got to the cuff. At The Gambler's request, I lengthened the cuff, and also knit the fingers longer - they just leave his fingertips exposed. I probably should have knit the pinkie shorter - I might just try to snip off the end and graft it closed. I christened them "Dedos", which is Spanish for fingers. A Spanish name seemed appropriate given the origin of the yarn. And since The Gambler decided to get a super short haircut just before the winter weather sets in, I used most of the remaining yarn to knit this - the pattern is called Jacques Cousteau, but I have christened it Juan Coustagua. 8 inches of 3 x 2 ribbing left me happy to get to the decreases! I have been wearing my own fingerless gloves alot in the last few weeks, but find myself wanting something that would keep my fingers more protected from the cold. The pattern is called Negative Space - but I have named them Hand Hoodies. I extended the palm so that it would cover the base of my fingers, as well as the "hood" so that it extends to my fingertips. They await an applied I-cord bind off. I'm trying to decide if I should go up a needle size as the pattern instructs. In order to fit my hands knitted them with US 10.5 (instead of the US 10 called for in the pattern) needles, so going up a needle size to a US 11 means a 1.5mm increase, rather than the .5 mm increase going from a US 10 to a US 10.5 (my kingdom for a 7mm Options or Harmony tip!) Finally, I started a pair of plain stockinette socks - I've got a 4 day conference next week, and wanted to have something I could work on to keep me from falling asleep as I listen to the speaker. Turns out, that they have knitted up fairly quickly. I haven't completely finished the first sock - there's still some ribbing to do; I went to see a 3 hour opera simulcast today, and in order to not waste good knitting time, I started the second sock. Luckily I have two 2.5mm circs. Hey! They match my catnip toy! This is some ONline sock yarn that I picked up at my neighborhood LYS - Passionknit. They moved to a new location at the beginning of September, and I finally got around to checking it a week and a half ago. I need more sock yarn like I need more stray cat hair on clothing, but I couldn't resist the combination of teal and lime green. BTW - do other people find that sock yarns that are sold in balls rather than in skeins don't get the respect they deserve? I once heard a knitter proudly announce that she no longer used with sock yarn that wasn't sold in a skein. You'd think that if it's good enough for Kaffe Fasset, it should be good enough for her. A few commenters have asked about Somerset - she's still flagrantly hyperthyroid: When are you going to turn down the heat? She's not going in to the clinic until Monday. Then the radioactive iodine is administered on Wednesday. It's after that that she's going to be kept in a lead lined box for a week. With no visitors. It's already breaking my heart to imagine it.

Knitaly

September in Italy is still quite hot, but I did see many "inspirational knits"Forget Prada - my face was pressed up against the glass at the Missoni stores. This particular sweater was quite tame in terms of patterning, but I liked how the stitch pattern combined with the colour changes on the yoke. Too cute! Not sure what this lace pattern is - not being able to use the flash through a shop window doesn't make it any easier to identify. Not a knit, but a neat idea - a silk scarf that was basted and shirred. And of course, what better time to finish my Tuscany shawl than during our time in Tuscany! I just kept knitting until the yarn was almost gone. I think I did about 15.5 pattern repeats; maybe 16.5. Euro coin for scale. The "just cast off shot" It took a while after returning home to block it - but here it is: I ended up finishing it one month after the day I cast on - so much for my Ravelympics attempt.

My, but time does fly...

It's been almost a week since I last posted. Part of this was related to travel (we went to Montreal this weekend so that The Gambler could watch the UFC fights. I have to say that the influx of UFC fans made for some interesting people watching), and partly due to work (Word continues to get around to horridly ill people re: the day I take over the ICU service - this is the only explanation I can think of as to why these people come to the ER after 3-4 days on death's door. Obviously, they were waiting for me to be on call.) Because I was in Montreal, I missed Sandi Purl's baby shower - but here are the squares I knit for the group afghan she received: OK, they appear to be more quadrangular than square per se - I'm hoping that blocking took care of that. Speaking of blocking, I blocked my Deviation from the Standard Handwarmers on Thursday morning as I drove into work (What better item to block handwarmers with than hands? Why not take advantage of a 45 minute commute?): It didn't do much for the wonky stitches, but it did stretch them out a bit. (I seem to have a prediliction for posing with handknits while wearing clothes of a totally opposing colour scheme - at least my manicure didn't clash) I had the opportunity to work on the Yoke Vest (which I have christened The Consolation Vest): ...and was eventually able to pry Somerset off of it long enough to get a decent photo: The striping is a bit remniscent of my Lines In The Sand Sweater - hopefully this vest will be similarly flattering ( I have some reservations about a vest knit out of bulky yarn - how likely is it to make my torso look stumpy?).

If I only had a (working) brain...

Last Saturday, I got home from work, and The Gambler wasn't home. I decided that all I wanted for dinner was a salad. We generally buy the "3 in a bag" romaine hearts - there was a brand new bag in the refrigerator, so I opened it up, washed one of the hearts, peeled off some leaves, and then wrapped the remaining lettuce in a paper towel, put it back in the bag with the other lettuce, and then put it away. Sunday night, The Gambler was getting my lunch ready for Monday: "Where's the lettuce?" he asked. "I put it back in the fridge - did you try looking in the vegetable drawer?" I replied, mentally shaking my head at his suboptimal food-locating skills. "...I don't see it in the drawer - just some peppers, carrots and celery" "Well, maybe it's on that shelf below the cheese drawer - where we store the wraps." "Nope, don't see it." Obviously, I think to myself, my husband must suffer from Male Pattern Blindness - being unable to see anything in the fridge that is not in front and at eye level. "Let me just finish this row and I'll find it for you" Two minutes later - he triumphantly announces: "I found the lettuce - you put it in the freezer." Oh. Last fall, during our Eurotrip, I stopped in at a Lana Grossa yarn shop in Nurnberg, and saw some discontinued bulky yarn for the bargain price of 1.5 euros/skein. So I bought 9 of them. Generally, the thickest yarn that I knit with is worsted weight, but I liked the colourway and I couldn't resist the bargain. After we returned home, I looked through Ravelry to find a sweater pattern that called for bulky yarn, and found the Side-way Rib Cardigan by Nora Gaughan - used 7-9 skeins of bulky yarn depending on the size knit (BTW it was not entirely clear what "size" the 3 options represented - "garment on model measures 40 inches around" does not help one to decide which version to knit unless you tell us how many inches around the model is). It had been published in the first issue of KnitScene. I decided that I'd knit it at some point, and ordered a copy from Interweave Press. Fast forward to Saturday night - after eating my salad, I sat down and swatched for the cardigan: The gauge wasn't quite on , but I blocked it, and set it to dry - a quick re-measurement suggested that it would be fine. I then read through the pattern, trying to decide a) which size to knit, b) whether to knit the sleeves flat (as written) or in the round, and c) whether to lengthen the garment. Sunday, I managed to escape the hospital early, and sat down to do some knitting. I decided that I should probably enter the yarn into my Ravelry stash. I entered "9" skeins in the total. The stash yarn summary indicated that I had 475 yards of yarn. Didn't ring any alarm bells. I took another look at the pattern to decide how much leeway I had in terms of making the garment longer - and saw that the yarn used in the pattern came in 100g skeins, and the yarn that I bought came in 50g skeins. The discontinued yarn that I bought in Germany in October. Oh. Surprisingly, when you google "Lana Grossa Colore", you don't come across any online shops that sell it anymore. So I then tried making all sorts of bargains with the Devil, looking at other bulky yarns that I might mix in, messaging poeple who had some of the same colourway to see if they might want to sell/trade for their skeins, and emailing Romni Wools to see if they had any (they don't). Damn. But I did come across the Yoke vest pattern from Loop-d-Loop (available at my friendly neighborhood public library), which should work with my yardage (although the pattern is written for only 2 sizes - small/medium and large, where large = 34 inch bust, and the only difference between the 2 sizes is needle size, which is a designer copout IMHO). So the Side-way rib Sweater goes back in the freezer. I mean queue.

Almost makes you want to take up golf...

Remember the Sheep Tea Cozy ? I am now the proud owner of a Sheep Golf Club Cover kit. Since neither of us golf, (yes, I am a physician who does not golf. I'm not an imposter - my handwriting is crap.) I'm trying to figure out what other use I might put this to once I knit it. It's too long to be a cell phone cozy (and since I usually end up rummaging through my purse while my cell phone merrily rings away, the last thing I need is to have to slip a cozy off the phone before I can answer the damned thing). (No new Sock in Progress photos today - I have only knit about 4 rows since Sunday, since I on call this week. ) Follow up on our house sale - We have sold the house to the couple who made the first offer that we didn't like. Over the weekend there was counteroffer action back and forth, and on Tuesday we finally told our realtor the 3 options we would consider (Price 1 with the sale conditional on the sale of their house, Price 2 with no conditions, or letting the offer die), and they chose door #2. However, they managed to maintain the annoyance factor by asking for 3 weeks to arrange financing (3 weeks - what the hell kind of financing is going to take that long to arrange? Are they planning on putting some of their organs up for auction on ebay?). The annoyance is the fact that we now can't confirm financing on any house we want to buy until the end of the month. Bah! But Kyle is going to look at houses with The Perky Realtor on Friday, so we will see what happens. We have our BC house until the end of June. Oh - and Martina: it may seem that the house sold quickly, except for the fact that we put it up for sale in OCTOBER; about a month after the Okanagan real estate market goes into its winter hibernation. Is anyone doing Sockapalooza? I am seriously considering joining - my theory is that since I am trying to knit a pair of socks per month, it's not really adding to my list of projects, and I'm probably going to get matched with someone who has smaller feet than me...although once again, I suspect that this is one of those things that seems like a good idea at the time...

I knit a sheep!

This was a quick project that I finished last night; I started it last Tuesday. It was nice and small, which made it good for my recent short trip. So, what do you think it is?A Rowanoid hat? (Yes, that Lion is STILL wearing his Christmas outfit) Does this picture help? No? It's a tea cozy!! Now Kyle doesn't have to use an item of outerwear to keep his tea hot anymore. I bought the wool and pattern via ebay. The seller is a woman in Alberta who sells them as kits; the yarn is from her sheep. I can send her email address on to anyone who'd like it if you contact me via email - ladylungdoc AT hotmail.