knit-knit-knit

I knit on picovoli today and I took the leap of faith required to decide that I had knit far enough past the armholes to start the waist shaping decreases. I did one decrease round and one even round and put it away for a while. I’m very nervous about the whole thing. I definitely think this needed short-row shaping for the bust, which I do not know how to do. When I tried it on before deciding to start decreasing, the front of the top reached almost to the bottom of the bust as specified, but the back of the top was at least an inch below that. The curse of the DD!! But I’m just going to keep knitting and hope for the best. Worst case scenario, I give it to my mom or someone whose cup does not overfloweth quite so much.

I also started another booga bag. I need to use up some of this yarn or I am in serious trouble, and I wouldn’t mind having one for myself.

I *also* scored a bunch of cheap cheap cheap acrylic-wool blend yarn from the 50 cent bin at a thrift shop. Good for charity knitting (some of it is, anyway. Some of it I wouldn’t give to my dog!) and learning some new techniques and practicing stuff with if nothing else.

just some thoughts

My youngest is napping a bit unexpectedly right now, and I thought I might take the time to write a little bit before I pick up my picovoli (although I suppose I should really be calling it tivoli since I didn’t use the picot edging. Oh well, whatever.)

I bought some yarn to make yet another booga bag, but I don’t have the right needles. I decided I want to try making it out of a bulky weight yarn, and I really need a size 13. I tried with a 15 but it was way too loose, and the 10.5 I have is too small, and I just can’t seem to find one in a 13, which is really irritating.

I can’t figure out why I keep procrastinating picovoli. I really want to wear it -- but, it’s for me, is I think the problem here. Most of my knitting is for someone else. I think I just can’t get motivated when it’s “just” for me. What’s my problem, anyway? I’m not worth knitting for??

I’m going to work on this picovoli now. I have inspired myself.

school community knit-in

I was just checking Jacob’s school website for any “back to school” lists (I don’t think there is one other than “please send in big-ass check by end of August” and “please obtain enough uniforms to last through the year”) and I found this information about a community knit-in to benefit children with HIV! This is the pattern. I think I’ll try to do a few by the time shipping time rolls around.

Picovoli progress

This is what I was up to as of a few hours ago:



Funny thing - I always see pictures of people that they took themselves and I see the camera in the picture because I guess they took the pic in the mirror. I, on the other hand, stood in front of the mirror, pointed the camera at myself, and looked at the reflection of the viewfinder in the mirror. Hee hee hee.

YA FO

These suckers sure do knit up fast. I wonder, if I knitted one out of something chunkier, could I get a nice bag in, like, just a day??

This is Lori’s bag:

Drying, outside:



Sitting on my desk:



Jacob holding it up for the camera:



It has been noted by some that I have three children, and a job, and a husband, and, it might seem, a lot of available knitting time. How can that be? Well, today at lunch I had a Jones diet black cherry soda. The lid had a message inside for me:

booga II

The second booga is currently felting! Pre-felting pics here:





These are too fun to make ☺
So I ended up giving the last one to Emily instead of Lori, and now THIS one will be for Lori. I’m thinking of making myself one with the leftovers - although I did notice my MIL eyeballing Emily’s, so we’ll see.

nano neuro knitting

“I wonder if Grumperina saw this!“

That’s the first thing I thought when I came across the column headed ”Nano Neuro Knitting in the “News and Views” section of the Veterinary Forum magazine/journal (their motto: Real Practice. Real Medicine.“)

No, it’s not some really cool method of knitting very tiny brains as I had wildly hoped for a moment. It is instead a discussion of an ”extraordinary and brilliant manuscript that portends an entirely new direction for research into neuronal regeneration following traumatic injury.“ The manuscript in question is Proc Natl Acad Sci 103(13):5054-5059, 2006. Ellis-Behnke RG, Liang Y-X, You S-W, et al. M.I.T., Cambridge, MA, and the U of Hong Kong. The ”knitting“ refers to axonal regrowth and connection across a nanofiber network formed following injection of a 1% peptide scaffold solution - not, unfortunately, to knitting very tiny brains. Oh well. It’s hella cool, but not quite as knitworthy as it seemed on the surface.

:)

and the final pictures...

I sewed in one of my labels:



Hung it up, with a few peppers from the garden, just for fun:



And took one last picture to show off the label in situ:

finished booga bag!

Oskar found it shortly after I completed it last night, while I was getting my camera to take a pic of it:



But I saved it, and took a picture of it back where I had originally set it to photograph it:



This morning, I prepared to felt it by putting it into a blue pillowcase:



But then I wanted to see how it would look as a hat, first:



I decided to block it with Jacob’s lunch box. He doesn’t mind. The woolite, btw, was not involved in this procedure at all, it just happened to be there. I actually used concentrated All detergent.



I took it outside to sit in the sun to dry, except it isn’t sunny in my yard at 7:30 am yet:

booga progress

It’s coming along. I’ve decided to start and end the stripes at kind of random places - or, progressively different anyway, so it’s a bit tricky counting my rounds of colors. I used the random stripe generator to make my stripe pattern and I’m really excited about that.

So thisis my progress so far. I don’t think it shows in this picture, but the bottom of the bag is a much darker purplish color than the periwinkle on the needle right now.

little quickie updates

I have a new project in the works:



yes, a booga bag - I’m using lamb’s pride worsted instead of the kureyon, and it’s for my SIL’s birthday.

And a little glimpse of picovoli-in-progress - which is really not that faded salmon color - it’s really more of a dark orangey color:

oh, the stupid

I went to my LYS today to get a tiny bit of help. I was at the part of picovoli where you need to cast on the stitches that become the edge of the underarm, and I wasn’t sure quite how to do it. They showed me, and I did it, and I finished the casting on round, and the following round, and then I realized I had screwed up and shorted myself by FOUR STITCHES ON EACH UNDERARM! So I had to frog those rounds, which wouldn’t have been a huge deal except that those two rounds included TWO JOININGS, due to my having finished a ball of yarn and then very shortly thereafter encountering a knot in the new ball of yarn! So that sucked. Plus, my first post-underarm round, I had used K2Tog at the edges of the underarms to tighten things up, and it is pretty hard to un-knit a K2Tog with this splitty splitty yarn (Wildflower DK). So I essentially spent three and a half hours at the LYS and ended up at the end of that time EXACTLY WHERE I WAS when I started. Except, well, now I knew how to proceed.

I did get a little bit of knitting time in later in the day and I am now back to where I was when I realized my mistake. But this was SUPPOSED to be my big “getting somewhere” day of knitting. Now it was just my “I’m a big fat fuckup” day of knitting. Hardly as good.

sheepie

That sheep I knit... it’s starting to haunt me. The kids apparently had a huge fight over it while I was at work. First of all, I’d like to state for the record that it’s been living in Naomi’s room since I knit it up, and Jacob has never expressed any interest in it at all. Neither has Lilah. So anyway, suddenly Naomi is carrying it somewhere and Jacob starts calling it “Meep,” and they had a fight over whether his name is “Meep” or “Sheepie.” I had always thought it was “Sheepie,” but what do I know? Michael apparently defused this by explaining that just like he has two names (I call him Michael; the kids call him Daddy), Sheepie can have two names - Meep and Sheepie. That calmed things down and then it was a matter of who got to play with him, which was solved with the use of a timer.

Today we had another big fight, and several small fights. I am going to have to knit another sheep. I do not WANT to knit another sheep. That thing took FOREVER to knit. Argh. Plus, Jacob wants a black one, and I am not cool with knitting in black. Maybe I can make a brown one. Or an orange one? Argh.

Note to self: do not knit sheep if at all avoidable!

I was going to include a shot of the sheep, but I realized there is already one in this blog. So, here is a pic of the iPod sock I knit my dad for his birthday back in April.