New Beginnings

Happy Thanksgiving! Knitting content is a little slim (yet again), but I have begun a project that is relevant to this blog - that is, the demolition and reconstitution of my craft room.

This blog rarely sees anything but knitting, but I do actually have a lot of crafts that I like to do. I scrapbook, I make cards and other paper crafts, and I have been a cross stitcher almost as long as I can remember. Knitting has kind of taken over, but at least part of that, I believe, is because my other crafts were so much less accessible. Since I moved into this house, I had grandiose plans for my craft room (which, to my mother's horror, had been in my living room up until then).

Unfortunately, none of those plans really came to pass. I had too much stuff, and not enough space for it. Plus, I am not by nature a neat and organized person, and my crafting process is rather manic. I make a big mess tossing things around until I get the effect that I want. Plus, since I had no office space, my computer stuff and office files and all that stuff were also crammed into the craft room. Essentially, I ended up with a room that was basically a complete junk pile, and my guest room was not much better, being used largely for storage of all the stuff that didn't fit in the craft room and that I didn't otherwise know what to do with.

Times are a-changing, and with my brother moving out, freeing up the basement bedroom to be the new guest room, and with CodeNinja moving in (and bringing all his stuff with him), it was time to do something about this "stuff" situation.

I have never spent any time in the craft room, and have never wanted to, it was so unpleasant in there. When I wanted to work on my paper crafts, I hauled all my stuff down to the kitchen table, made a mess, left it there for a week or so, and then took it up and piled it all back in the craft room. The room just wasn't pleasant to be in, despite being, in my opinion, one of the nicer room in the house. It's quite a good size, but it's long and rectangular. It has a recess with two large windows that face the front of the house, and it probably gets more light than any other room. There's no reason at all why it shouldn't be a perfectly lovely place to spend time in.

But, it wasn't, so I had to put some thought into figuring out why. One answer was obvious - it was too cluttered, cramped, and messy with all the stuff I had in there. Step 1 - we (by which I mostly mean CodeNinja) hauled all the stuff out of the craft room and into the now-empty den in the basement. I asked him to take a 'before' picture but he forgot, so here's all the stuff in the den and basement bedroom:





Looooooots of stuff. The goal is to go through this mess and sort out the craft from the non-craft, and also to purge as I go, getting rid of stuff I don't need, don't want, or don't use. Then, everything will be reorganized and reloaded into the craft room and the former guest room, which will now become an office. The office is really going to be CodeNinja's space; I'll have a desk in there, but I'll try to keep my stuff to a minimum, so we each have a retreat when we need some space.

The craft & guest rooms were very cold-looking before, so we picked a beige paint color with a bit of a pinky-peach undertone to warm the walls up a little bit, and the result is so much massively better than the color that was there before (a color I generally refer to as 'Old Dried Toothpaste'). I've already started rethinking where I put the crucial pieces of furniture and put some of the stuff back in there.




It's hard to get a good picture - the room is really about twice as big as it looks in most of these photos. The entrance to the room is a little odd, naturally closed off because the closet sticks out into the room in front of the door. I had the long table on the wall where the bookshelf is now, and the bookshelf was at the end of that table nearest the door, making the entrance even more closed. Lesson learned - I've cleared up that wall considerably to make it less overwhelming to walk into the room. There will have to be some more shelves & storage on the near wall, but I will take much better care this time to avoid getting that cramped feeling when you walk in.

I've also decided to use that computer desk as a working surface, and use the long tables only to hold supplies and lay things out that I want to look at. Before, I used the long table to work, but in order to have my tools on the table where I wanted them, I lost a huge amount of workspace and got frustrated very easily. This way, I'll have to do a little bit more moving back and forth, but my work area won't be cluttered with supplies, and I can use the keyboard tray to keep tools I really need to have to hand, like my paper cutter. I had developed a habit of cutting paper in my lap anyway, which was not very effective and, sadly, led to the demise of my paper cutter (leverage issue - snapped a piece off of it).

So, I have a long row to hoe, and a lot of time is going to be devoted to this, but I'm determined to have a working craft room at the end of it. Ideally, I would love to find a place in here for a chair and my spinning wheel, but I'm not sure that's going to happen. My biggest issue here is storage; I have spent a lot of money in the past on storage tools that just weren't really effective, so I'm trying to be very critical about buying new supplies.

This won't, of course, be the only area of the house where I'm purging, and CodeNinja will be responsible for purging on his end as well before we try to pack everything into this house.

I have been knitting, however, and I'm on the downhill slide with my Melpomene.



I had a bit of a set back the night before last when I apparently went temporarily insane and hauled off and knit my twists on the wrong side. It's not like it's easy to mistake, either. The front side looks like this:


Twisted stitches right there. The wrong side looks like this:



No twisted stitches, just something that looks kind of like 2x1 ribbing.

AND YET, not only did I knit a section of twisted stitches on the wrong side - after I fixed that, and knit merrily onward, not more than an hour after I took those pictures, I had to take another picture before I posted, so I could show you that I did this:



This time I started my short rows on the wrong side, and so while every other scallop faces the bottom of the shawl, this one faces the top of the shawl. Argh!!! Feeling rather red-faced over here. It's easy to fix, just one of those things that you can't figure out how you could not notice that. Especially having made a similar mistake so recently!! It boggles the mind.

I've also started my Madroña in my JulieSpins Glimmer Lace.



But, I've had another thought for yarn, so it's on hold until I get my second option and can swatch it.

I actually had several issues starting that shawl, not from any flaw in the directions, but because I have never used DPNs before, and I was dropping them all over the place. These are Chiaogoos, but they don't have the sharp lace tips, which is also a tad frustrating for me, addicted as I am to sharp tips. After a few rounds, I had enough stitches on the needles that I wasn't dropping them (as often), but it's still a bit awkward. I was hoping to avoid the ladder stitches I had on my Evenstar circular start, where I used two circs, and so far I haven't had that issue, but it definitely was more difficult than just doing things the way I was used to. (Speaking of which...I did the Emily Ocker cast on instead of Romi's recommended bellybutton cast on, because I was too impatient to figure out a new method).

That's really it on the knitting front. I owe CodeNinja some fingerless gloves, so that's on the horizon, as soon as I can tear myself away from my lace!

Musing

Another week managed to slip by without a blog post. Mea culpa, my dear bloggees!

Sadly despite the lateness, I don't have much to tell. The newest muse is out and, consequently, on my needles.





I've barely started. This is Melpomene by Romi and the yarn is Dragonfly Fibers Djinni Sock in Black Pearl. This yarn is a little crisper to work with that the other incarnations of Djinni I've used, but that's not very unusual for yarn that is mostly black, in my experience.

And, I finished my Buttonwillow!



But she's not blocked yet.

Other than that, my time has largely been taken up with wedding planning and stash enhancement. I picked up some lovelies in light of The Sanguine Gryphon's - reorganization? Shut down? I'm not sure what to call it, but I cashed in.

3 skeins of Gaia lace in Memoirs des Arbres, and beautiful rich dark brown.



A skein of Skinny Bugga in a puzzling colorway called Sooty Dancer. It photographs as kind of a dark green with black mixed in, which is what I expected when I bought it, but when you're looking at it in real life, it's pretty thoroughly black.



And one skein of Eidos in a color I can neither remember nor properly pronounce. I think it started with a P, and I did all manner of unnatural things to this photo to try and get the color to turn out correctly. I got close, but it's still not really accurate.



I also snagged one skein of Metamorphosis from A Verb For Keeping Warm, whose yarns I've been meaning to try for ages, in anticipation of the imminent public release of Caliz, a pattern Romi originally designed for AVFKW's shawl club. The color is Transnational Fury.



And last but not least, the Great White Yarn search. I looked all over for white-white yarn to go with my wedding dress, and had trouble finding it anywhere in a blend I was happy with. Finally, on the advice of some dear Rav friends, I contacted Julie at JulieSpins on Etsy, who prepared some of her glimmer lace (mostly wool, some silk, and a tiny bit of angelina) for me in her "Here Comes The Bride" colorway - a beautiful white-white. I'm thrilled. I'm going to take a crack at making the October Pins & Lace pattern, Madrona, in this yarn, and if it works out the way it is in my head I'll be over the moon!

Triumphant

I didn't blog yesterday because I was determined to finish this:



My Umaro blanket is done, and none too soon, for cold weather advances upon us. This project hit the stage where it infuriated me greatly that it wasn't finished, and I spent just about every spare knitting moment on it for the last week and a half to finish it. On the advice of others I added a repeat, so it is not only long enough for me, but for my soon-to-be-DH. Although he is hardly ever cold. In fact, I'm marrying him for his heat-producing capabilities, as I'm chronically cold.

I have exactly one ball of yarn left over, untouched, unopened, unloved. I'll find a use for it. Maybe it will be reincarnated as felted slippers.

I was forced to take a brief hiatus from knitting on the blanket with the single-mindedness and intensity of a marathon runner in her last mile (or a madwoman, however you want to look at it) to go out and socialize with people. I took my naughty, color-shifting buttonwillow with me, only to find once I got where I was going, that I'd made a mistake somewhere and had an extra column of stitches that wasn't supposed to be there. Now, I like to think I'm good at fixing mistakes but mistakes on the edge of a row have always been my downfall, so I gave in to the inevitable, ripped back almost a whole repeat of Chart A (which is only like six rows, but they're getting kind of long at this point) and managed to get it set back up so that when I return home tonight, I can attack it with renewed vigor. I'm in a serious finish-it-up mood at the moment, and I'm riding with it. I'm even starting to think about that cozy sweater from French Girl Knits that's sitting abandoned upstairs.

But, let's not get carried away. The October Pins & Lace shipment is due in my mailbox any day now and we all know I'm going to drop everything as soon as it gets here! (Depending on whether I have to buy needles and yarn.)

Oh, I almost forgot - I also blocked (finally) the Scarf That Would Not Die. I think, despite all my frustration that it was forever short of six feet...I overachieved.



That's a lot closer to seven feet (if not eight) than it is to six. Oh well. He'll wear it, and he'll like it.

Catching Up

Sunday may become our new regularly scheduled blog day. I prefer to spend Sunday knitting and take pictures at the end of the day, since I usually make pretty good progress on Sundays, but I'll just have to make do.

I've been working on my Buttonwillow but progress has been slower than it could be, because it's getting cold here, so I keep reaching for my big squishy Umaro blanket.



As I laid Buttonwillow out to take its picture, I realized something disturbing.



There is a very distinct color line where I changed skeins. Now, I've been very fortunate with this kind of thing in the past, so I guess it was inevitable that I would have this issue eventually. But I'm feeling a little grumpy about it. I didn't alternate rows, obviously, but I didn't really think it would be an issue. I'm not ripping it out. my buttonwillow will just have to be striped.

Sigh.

I also finally got some long overdue blocking done. This prayer shawl has been laying around my house for ages waiting for me to get around to blocking it, and at last, I have done so.







This yarn is a wool/microfiber blend. I'm not even sure what it is now - I know I got it from LittleKnits but--time for a rav check. Please hold.

...

Okay, it's Rowan Cashsoft Aran, and the pattern is "Prayers of Love" by Carla Willingham.

Anyway, so instead of soaking and pinning, I put it in the washer on my 'hand wash' cycle, and then took it, still damp, and ran wires through the edges and pinned it out. Then I took a towel and my iron and, keeping the towel between the shawl and the iron, and without putting my iron down even on the towel, I puffed steam all over it and steamed it really well, until it was damp(er). Then I left it until it was dry, at which time I unpinned it and took it to my prayer shawl group to turn in, immensely pleased with myself for having finally gotten off my butt to do it.

I also blocked my Kleio, since the person for whom it was a gift was in town this weekend. I gave it to her on the condition that she modelled it for me, so here she is!



With a Romi pin:



I adore the edging on this piece, it really just makes the look.







Love, love, love. Again, this is Kleio from Romi in Sunshine Yarns Classic Sock, and the whiter colorway is "Luna," and the more colorful one is "Dobby." Appropriate, as my friend is a big Harry Potter fan!

We've been best friends since middle school and Kleio, the muse of history, is just so perfect for her, and the colors are so exactly her colors, that I really couldn't be happier with this project. She loved it, too, which really made my day.

Now, if you'll excuse me, dear readers, it's very chilly today, and I feel the need to knit a large squishy wool blanket!

Gasp! A real blog entry! With real pictures!

Again, desperately sorry for the hiatus, folks. I'm going to have to work out a new blog schedule with my new job. The hours are a little different from what I'm used to and I have plenty to fill my time, so no down time to blog in.

On with the WIP report! Here's what I've been up to:

1. Umaro
It got cold outside and I went running for this blanket. It's so squishy and it will be so warm, I'm looking forward to wrapping up in it. I've got almost three repeats done out of seven, so I still have a long way to go, but it's coming along nicely.







2. Galadriel's Mirror
I picked this one up for a little while, but it kind of got sidelined when my life became a swirling vortex of chaos. I just didn't (and really still don't) have the mental energy for it just at the moment, but I did make some progress.





3. Buttonwillow
Of course I have to have a Romi on my needles, and this is her newest design, Buttonwillow, released today for Ravelry purchase. This design debuted at Vogue Knitting Live and then was available as a kit only. I got the kit so I've been working on this one for a few days already. Road to China light is gorgeous and oh so soft, very nice to have in your hands. Mine is in the Grey Pearl colorway. This is really a good knit for me right now, it's pretty simple and it just feels nice.





So that's it for the works in progress, other than a sock I've been working on in Neighborhood Fiber Company Capital Luxury Sock. When I did my stash organization I found that I had bought a whole bunch of this yarn in different colors, but had never actually knit with it! I decided it was time to fix that, picked out one, wound it up, and it's my mindless, carry-around knitting.

Many of my finished objects are languishing waiting to be blocked. Kleio is in that pile, sadly.





Lovely, finished, and unblocked. I've got some new blocking wires on the way, though, so I'm waiting for those to come in before I worry too much about this one. I do have a lot of ends to weave in on this one before it can be blocked anyway.

I did, however, finally block my Katanya (also by Romi):









So there you have it, and hopefully I will return in a more timely fashion next week!

Still Alive!!!

Deepest apologies, my much beloved blogees, for my extended absence! I hope to be back to blogging shortly, but there has been a lot of upheaval chez Ninja of late. Here's a brief synopsis:

--I finished Kleio
--I got a new job
--My brother also got a new job in another state, which means he is moving out of my basement in rather short order
--We took a quick beach vacation between the end of the old job and the start of my new one AND...CodeNinja and I are engaged! We're hoping to be married in the spring, and there is soooo much to do!

With all of that going on, I just haven't managed much knitting, and I haven't blocked Katanya or Kleio. I have done some work on my Umaro blanket and some on Galadriel's Mirror, plus I started a boring plain vanilla pair of socks, as that's all I seem to have the brain power for. I have not knit in four days, that's how crazy it's been. I finally broke that unfortunate streak this evening thanks to the boring socks.

Of course the second (or third) question every knitter asks is, what, if anything, I'm going to knit for my wedding. The answer is - I have NO idea!! I don't even feel like I can decide that until I get a dress. I don't know that there is time or that I want to put myself through the stress of knitting anything. When I announced my engagement on the Romi Rav board I had tons of support and several offers for help if I did want a knitted item for the wedding. It was very sweet and I'm honored by all the attention. I'm just totally unequipped to decide at the moment. Part of me wants to do something crazy and knit a Princess Shawl or something of the kind in cobweb yarn to wear, perhaps as a veil. But, I don't know. Again, it depends on the dress. If I have something with a lovely back I might not want to cover it. If I have something with a simpler back then the shawl might jazz it up a little.

Also, I'm afraid CraftMama is not terribly knit-friendly and while I am sure if I wanted to wear a shawl she would not say anything, but I fear the Eyeroll of Doom. I know, it's my wedding and I should wear my knitting if I want to, and if I decide I want to, I will. I just don't know what to do yet. Obviously, if I decide to knit something myself I need to decide pretty soon to make sure I have enough time to actually knit it - although I feel like I am reasonably speedy at this point in my knitting career.

So, in light of all this, I hope you will forgive me for my radio silence. I hope to have pictures of knitting to show in the near future, as soon as I can face up to all the pins I will have to use to block either Kleio or Katanya. Blocking both at the same time is not really feasible - there is no way I have enough pins for that!

iPhone Fabulous

It's been a busy and rather tiring few days (how does that happen on a holiday weekend? how?) so I was lazy and I have nothing but iPhone pics for the blog today. I don't even have the fancy iPhone, I have a 3. Not a 3gs, mind you. A plain old cheapy iPhone 3. Suffice it to say, the camera is merely adequate at best. Nevertheless! It will have to do.

I celebrated the holiday by laboring (get it?) on my Katanya shawl in utter determination to get it finished. There is this problem with shawls knit from the neck down, that by the time you are nearing the end, each row seems to take an eternity. I find this very discouraging when I'm knitting on weeknights and can't get through more than a row or two a night because it takes an hour or more to do a given row, so I generally counteract this frustration by working like a fiend on the weekends to get some visible progress. In this case, I was close enough to the end of this shawl that I had some hope that I could finish it over the weekend, saving myself from the tear-inducing weekday slog.

The bind-off for this shawl is supremely clever but also interminable and rather time consuming, so I was hoping if I got all the charts done by Sunday, I could do the bind-off on Monday. When that didn't happen, when I went into Monday with two rows of the chart to go (one very fiddly pattern row and then the endless WS purl row back), I thought, it's not going to happen. There's no way I'm going to get through these AND the bind-off. Especially since SOMEONE invited me to go to the yarn store and I lost knitting time to fondling some Neighborhood Fiber Company fingering weight silk that was to DIE for. The colors shone so brightly they practically glowed in the dark, and the yarn was so SOFT. Some of that WILL be mine someday. But I digress.

Anyway, I knit on the way to the yarn store (I wasn't driving, don't worry) and I knit on the way back from the yarn store, and then I ran inside and threw some laundry in the washer and sat down to knit some more. I knit and I knit and I knit and then I started binding off and I thought, I will NEVER get this done. Especially because I had some issues with the bind off at first. I don't do well with counting bind-off stitches, and counting was more or less required, so I kept getting confused and ripping back because I just had no idea where I was. Then I gave up on counting, figured out how I thought the pattern was supposed to line up (Romi is so darn clever it hurts) and just did that. I really didn't think I would finish. I thought I was going to have to quit before I even got to the halfway mark, but finally, finally, I hit a rhythm and got going and suddenly it was 10 p.m. and I looked at what I had left, and I was so close that I could not, simply COULD NOT, stop knitting. So I kept going and finished the bind-off at 11 p.m. (not as dramatic as finishing at 3 a.m., but I'm just as happy that way). And so, my Katanya is done. Sadly, since I finished it so late, I have only this pitiful little iphone pic of the crinkly, unblocked shawl to show you:



Expect something more spectacular next week. But do you see the edging on the shawl? So darn clever, I'm telling you, I can't stand it.

I did do one other thing this weekend, and that was, start my Kleio, and while I haven't gotten very far, I present to you here, the evidence of my infant Kleio:



I have been watching the Ravelry knitalong with a certain amount of envy for everyone that is so far ahead of me, but I had just hit that critical mass point on Katanya where I was so close to being done that I couldn't put it down. But now I am looking forward to some sweet, sweet garter stitch - at least until I get to the braids that separate the garter from the lace section. Should be interesting.

Oh, and here's at least a little proof that I did all that frogging I said I was going to do, although I forgot all about it the day I blogged and vowed to go home and do it that night. But, still! Frogging was done!



Frogging that hat specifically was a little difficult, I have to admit. It seemed a waste of all the work that went into it, but really, I hated working on the darn thing, the yarn clung to the needles like it had claws - I even had trouble getting the needle out of the darn thing so I could frog it! I didn't even particularly like the colors together. It would have made ABSOLUTELY no sense to keep it since I'm sure I would never have finished it. Frogging got easier the further I went, though, and the less it looked like a hat and the more it looked like a pot holder. After that, the frogging was easier. I was positively gleeful while I frogged the chocolate waffle scarf. I did get a little stuck on the KSH shawl. Mohair has a reputation for being really difficult to frog, and the reputation is well deserved. I gave up on it in frustration after a while, frogged everything else, and just sort of shoved that shawl on the corner of the couch to deal with later. Much later. But, as I was frogging it I did see more mistakes than I had originally thought existed in the shawl, so I feel much better about my frogging decision in that situation.