Freeeeeeedom!!!

Three or four weeks of silence deserves a bonus post, don't you think?

I've finished Madrona! No pictures as yet, but she's finished. And that means - I'm free to knit other stuff again! This excites me greatly as I am pretty far behind on all of Romi's beautiful creations. So, the question is, what shall I knit next?

1. Caliz - this design came out several months ago, and was originally a club pattern for A Verb for Keeping Warm. I've heard nothing but good things about AVFKW so I'm excited to try out their yarns. I wasn't in the club, but I picked up a skein of AVFKW Metamorphosis that's been all wound up and ready for this pattern. The buzz is that this will be a pretty quick knit, which will be perfect while I wait for yarn to arrive for...

2. Erato - The newest muse from Romi is out, but after reviewing my stash and thinking about the person I want to give this too, I've decided I need to purchase yarn for it. I've picked Fleece Artist Woolie Silk 3-ply in Rose. It's a heavier weight than called for by the pattern, which I hope will result in a slightly larger end product. This shawl is flirty, feminine, and sweet, and I knew immediately which of the wonderful ladies in my life I wanted to give it to. She's been a wonderful support and friend and I'm excited about surprising her with this shawl. But, since I'm not using stash, I have to wait for the yarn to arrive, so I will fill my time with Caliz until it does.

3. Pulelehua, Pins & Lace Winter 2012 - I'm really excited about this gorgeous shawl. I love butterflies in general, and my first memories are of Hawaii, so this shawl speaks to me on multiple levels. I tossed around a few stash ideas for this, but Jennifer at Spirit Trail Fiberworks had extra club yarn available, and I had to go for it. There's just no more perfect color for this pattern, and the pictures are absolutely gorgeous. I'm really excited to start this one (and what a gorgeous splash of color to break up the bleakness of winter - even an unseasonably warm winter), but, again, I will have to wait for the yarn to get here.

4. Galadriel's Mirror - Honestly, I can't think of anything I would rather knit less at this point in winter than a grey shawl, but as this one remains unfinished, I'm keeping it on my to-knit list. I have 2 charts to go, and although the rows are incredibly long at this point, the knitting itself is getting simpler, so if I can just hang in there a little longer, there is a chance I will actually finish this one in my lifetime.

5. Permafrost - I also owe this one some attention. I began it during a bout of startitis when none of my other projects were at a particularly happy place, and it's been stalled for sometime, so it's time to get the motor revving again.

Ergh, that list actually looks pretty daunting, doesn't it, especially when I have lots more wedding planning and moving stuff in my future? My priorities are the Romi projects. It's easier for me to help others on the forum when I've worked on a shawl myself, and to be honest, it's just so much fun knitting with others!

AND, in two weeks Romi is releasing two more muses at Stitches West. I don't know how I'm going to keep up! (Answer: I'm not. There's just no way.)

Oh well, it's a beautiful place to be in, isn't it, having more beautiful patterns and yarn than you know what to do with? Nothing to do but keep calm and knit on!

Look! Knitted Stuff!

I can't believe how long it's been since my last post, but sadly, all of the posts I would have made would have been the same. "Still here, not much to show, work and wedding are taking up all my time!"

BUT, today I do have some things to show! After an incredibly grueling couple of weeks at work, I finally got some time to relax a bit, and work on my Madroña wedding shawl. One wing is now complete and I am well into the second! In fact, I took this picture a couple of days ago, so it's a bit out of date. You repeat the wing chart 12 times for each wing and then knit one more chart, ending in the bind off. At the time of this picture, I had only about 4 repeats complete on the second wing. I'm now up to 9 repeats. It's funny how much faster you can get at knitting a chart after you've done it 16 times already.



Unless work or some other fact of life interferes, I'm hoping I can be finished by the end of the weekend. I can get about 1 chart repeat done a night - 1 and a half if I get home a little early. I was hoping to get to 10 repeats over the weekend, but I decided the superbowl was too high risk to have this around, what with the jumping and the cheering and the food everywhere. So, I started a little side project!



Everyone has been saying what a super quick knit Romi's Gothic Tam is, and they did not lie. The hat consists of 4 charts plus the ribbed brim. I got through 3 of the 4 charts during the game (plus some post-game commentary). I actually attempted to start this hat a while ago but got a case of the stupids regarding the Emily Ocker cast on, despite the fact that I've done it several times before, so I had to go look up a video tutorial for a refresher before I started yesterday. But, once I got going, it was really quite an easy knit and a fairly intuitive pattern - easy to catch your mistakes on. To be honest, it's calling me a bit - I could totally finish this tonight if I tried - but the wedding shawl comes first. You can bet I'll be finishing up this one as soon as I get the chance though.

I'm actually hoping I'll have enough yarn to make two. A dear friend sends me yarn every year for Christmas from a local farm fesitval. I never know what she's going to send and I always love getting it because it's one of a kind. This year she sent me two skeins of undyed alpaca. I'm hoping I can make a hat from each skein, and then I'll have one to keep and one to send back to her. The only snag is, she's not a knitter, and I worry that when I send her back things made from the yarn she gave me, she thinks I don't like it. This year she asked if I was tired of getting yarn. I said, NO PLEASE KEEP SENDING ME YARN PLEASE PLEASE.

As I sit here typing this, I'm remembering that she sent me two pretty hefty skeins of yarn naturally dyed yarn last year too that would make really cute tams...hmmmmm...

How many knitted hats do you think one Texan needs?

Small Victories

I have only this to show today:



The hands of my beloved, clad in wool to guard against the bitter cold. Finally. This completes the set of gloves, hat, and scarf I promised to make him sometime last year. He made the mistake of asking right as it was getting warm, and also of asking for a Scarf of Unusual Size (not really, but still) so it took a while. Then I got kind of stumped on the second glove because gloves are boring. But it's freezing outside and he refused to wear the other pieces until he had the complete set, and I felt guilty about his cold hands, so I overcame my second glove syndrome and lo, he can now go forth into the cold swaddled in red wool.

I also got the additional crystals I ordered and finished the bind off on the bottom section of my wedding shawl, but I haven't gotten any farther than that. I had to work over the long weekend (woe) which put a serious damper on the stuff I had planned to accomplish that weekend, so the only thing I have to show are a bunch of caligraphied invitations that I can't photograph without putting people's addresses online. I can't waint until I have time and energy to knit more - lots of 'want to knits' piling up while I try to deal with all this mess!

Reckless Optimism

Here is the list of knitting I took on my Christmas vacation:

1. Galadriel's Mirror
2. Second fingerless glove for CodeNinja
3. Yarn, needles, and pattern for a Gothic Tam
4. Permafrost

Here is the list of what I actually worked on during my Christmas vacation:

1. Galadriel's Mirror

Even with two plane flights and a total of 16 hours in the car, I worked on nothing but Galadriel's mirror and still didn't get anywhere close to done.

Still, it went from looking like this:



To looking like this:



...Yeah, still doesn't feel like much progress. However, I've now finished Chart 3, which means I only have two charts to go, and at least they're different (charts 1, 2 and 3 were very similar). And, even better, it doesn't have any bobbles. I have come to loathe the bobble. I don't mind fiddlly knitting, but I don't even really care that much for the final effect, so that was kind of frustrating. I could have substituted, done something else, saved myself from bobble hell, but I decided the bobbles were integral to the texture of the shawl so I did them as written.

I solemnly swear I will never bobble again.

I did actually lose quite a bit of knitting time on this trip. I don't think I knit at all once we got off the plane, until the day after Christmas when we left for the first 8 hours of driving. Even then, it took me a while into the trip to pick it up.

I have, my friends, discovered that it is possible to be too tired to knit. I was sick for the first part of my vacation, which accounted for some of it, but really, I wasn't feeling so lousy that there should have been that big of an issue. It wasn't the illness - I was just too darn tired. I always have a lot of commitments in December, and I really think I just overdid it. The end of 2011 was totally consumed with the Great Revamping Of My Life, and for once, I didn't have any energy left to create.

I'm starting to get my mojo back a little bit. There's still a lot to do and many, many demands on my time and energy, but I'm trying to make time - if for no other reason than I won't have a wedding shawl if I don't! (That's a lie. The members of Romi's group on Ravelry are awesome and I have had tons of offers to knit a shawl for me for the wedding, so I'm sure if I got worried, I could pass it off and have a finished version back in a week.)

Speaking of which, I've now arrived at the point in my Madrona shawl where I bind off half of the circle I've been making, and as planned, I've been adding crystals to the edge.




I have to admit, it's a lot of crystals, and the yarn in the shawl is already sparkly, so I was afraid of it being overkill - but oh, they're so pretty. When I pick up the shawl it glitters and shines, and compared to the crystals, the metallic thread in the yarn is downright subtle. I feel good about it. Except I miscounted the number of crystals I would need and I ran out before the bind off was finished. I have more on order, but this shawl is officially stalled until I receive them. Shipping is usually pretty quick, though, so I expect that by the time I have dedicated knitting time again, I'll have crystals. So many crystals.

Finding the Time

I feel like a broken record, coming here week after week to say "I haven't had time to do much, but here's what I have," but sadly it remains true! I'm cramming knitting time in between other things, and there are times when I'm just too tired to knit. But, I leave for my Christmas vacation next week, and there will be plenty of plane and car time for knitting, so I'm hoping I'll catch up some then!

In the meantime, I'm still managing to make progress in small spurts. Exhibit A - my wedding shawl.



I'm into chart C. This shawl is sort of like a diamond with rectangular panels attached to its top two sides. To achieve this, you start out in the round, and then cast off the bottom half of the diamond, put half the remaining stitches on holders, and knit the wings side to side. (I'm sure there's more to it than that, but I haven't gotten that far yet.) The cast off is done with the same crochet loops that Romi has used on some of her previous designs like Fiori. I've ordered some teardrop-shaped pendant crystals. I hope to put them on the little crochet loops - although examinations of the FOs posted to Ravelry at this point seem to suggest I might want to lengthen the chains slightly to accommodate this. I have two concerns with this plan: 1) Will the crochet chains fit through the holes on the crystals? 2) Will I look like I plundered a chandelier? But, there is no way to know except to knit, so the crystals are ordered. If I'm really lucky they'll get here in the next few days. I haven't decided whether I'm taking the shawl with me on my Christmas trip - I have some concerns about it getting dirty or messed up, or that the crystals won't arrive and I'll be stuck. Maybe I'll take the second skein of yarn with me and knit the lace strips I'm hoping to make to go on the bouquet on the trip. We'll see.

It's finally gotten cold here (mostly. the cold is very indecisive.) so I've been trying to finish out the third part of the matched set CodeNinja requested all that time ago.



Fingerless gloves. This pattern is Urban Necessity, which I have knit many, many times. I had the first glove all the way to the fingers when I decided it was too big and ripped the whole thing out to do the next size down. I'm not exactly sorry, since the fit is much, much better now, but - well. If I hadn't had to do that the gloves would be done. As it is, they are not done.



But I'm almost finished with the thumb gusset on the second one, so the end is in sight. Once I make it up to the fingers, the rest is fiddly, but quick. I did make one modification to the pattern this time around, which was to rib the ends of the fingers so that they don't roll back as they have in gloves past. It's a brilliant idea and I feel dumb for not thinking of it four pairs ago.

My office had a potluck and "dirty santa" exchange today, and though CodeNinja kindly took care of the potluck part for me, I failed to plan ahead on the dirty santa thing. So, last night at 11:30 p.m. I was sitting on my bed, frantically threading beads on metallic yarn to make this:



I would have started half an hour sooner but somehow the metallic yarn didn't end up with the rest of the yarn when we unloaded and sorted the craft room, so I was frantically dismantling the carefully sorted piles of stuff in my basement trying to find it. It was a risky move. I'm already tired and overall short on sleep, and to add to that, I stabbed myself rather brutally with the needle I was using to thread the beads while trying to dislodge one bead with a particularly small hole from the eye of the needle. That could have impacted my knitting capability for weeks, but it seems to be doing all right now, and I was able to solider on and complete the ornament shortly before 2 a.m. I'm somewhat consoled for my loss of sleep by the fact that the ornament hit the maximum three swaps in the dirty santa exchange, and, after a hard-fought battle, the winner was my boss.

I'm also slightly tickled by the fact that, out of sheer, blind coincidence, because the only thing I was thinking last night was "which ornament pattern has the fewest beads" and "anything but red, I'm so tired of red," I managed to do the ornament in our company colors. I was totally floored when someone congratulated my company spirit over it!

The Best I Can

Readers may find this somewhat difficult to believe, but preparing a wedding, preparing for Christmas, preparing for the merging of two households' worth of stuff, showing up at work everyday, and managing all your normal activities, is rather time consuming. I reviewed The List yesterday and emailed CodeNinja the following:

"How is it that we've done all this work and yet I can't find anything to cross off The List?"

He replied, "Clearly The List is flawed."

I let pass his impugning of The List, sighed, and repeated my mantra of late - "Oh well. We're doing the best that we can."

I lost most of this past weekend to the picking of china patterns and the beginning of the wedding registry lists, so I was bound and determined last night to finish off the reorganization of the yarn stash and to get it loaded back into the craft room. I have mostly succeeded:



The yarn stash and the cross stitch stash have now been reviewed, purged, put neatly in bins, and loaded into the craft room closet in the most accessible manner I could manage. Really, I didn't do much with the cross stitch stash, except consolidate it into a single box. It doesn't take up much space and cross stitch will always have a place in my heart as the first craft I ever attempted, so it stays. I did sort a couple fairly large bags out of the yarn stash to donate, mostly of stuff I got very early in my knitting career before I knew what I liked. One of the small bins in that picture is entirely full of leftovers that I can't bear to get rid of for some reason. It's too much yarn to throw away, not enough to donate, and I occasionally have delusions that I'm going to make one of the many 'leftover' blankets out there (yes, I have seen the beekeeper quilt).

Although, this still remains:



This is my pile of WIPS - smaller than when last posted, to be sure, but I don't want to put these back in the closet where I can forget them, so I need to find them a home that is relatively in sight and accessible. Also in that pile, finished cross stitch projects I've never framed, which I would like to steam and have framed so I can hang them up, in the craft room and/or office.

Determined to do some knitting after all that work, and trying desperately not to think about exactly how much Stuff is left in the basement to be sorted (I have far more stuff for scrapbooking than for any other craft), I worked on what I hope will become my wedding shawl, Madroña in JulieSpins Glimmer lace.



You can't really see it in the picture but there's a thread of stellina that makes it sparkle. It's not much to show, but you know - I'm doing the best I can.

Wait, what happened?

Well, no suffering from a lack of content here today! I'm not sure what happened - one minute I had no knitting projects, and now I have suffered a minor project explosion.

I needed some Thanksgiving knitting, so I took my nearly complete Melpomene with me. I knew that wasn't enough knitting to get me through the whole day, but in the midst of everything else that was going on I failed to plan ahead adequately, and couldn't lay my hands on anything that had the right level of mindlessness and portability. I finally stuffed some yarn and pattern pages that I had lying around in a bag, and voila.



I cast on this Urban Necessity glove to complete the matched set for CodeNinja. I've really been pretty negligent about knitting these and they don't take very long, so I really ought to be ashamed of myself. In my defense, though - it hasn't been very cold. Anyway, I got this started in the car and then put it aside, since the 1x1 ribbed cuff was something I could knit in the dark on the way home. I kept knitting on it later in the weekend when we went Christmas tree hunting, and now I'm almost ready to put the thumb stitches on a holder. I need some time to finish it now with CodeNinja nearby so he can try it on and direct me as to the length of the fingers.

For the football viewing portion of Thanksgiving, I cast on this.



Permafrost by Jared Flood in his Loft yarn, colorway Snowbound. I don't know what I was thinking, this is going like lightening now, but as the number of stitches increases and increases - this is not going to be a quick project! I still have Galadriel's mirror hanging around, sad and neglected, if I needed a big project, and of course as soon as I figure out what I'm going to do for a wedding shawl, I'm going to drop everything else like it's on fire. But, oh well, it's started now, and I'm most of the way through Chart 2. I'll try to catch up on the knitting over my Christmas vacation.

And now for something completely different! Every year, the ladies' group at my church does an ornament exchange, and almost every year I've taken some type of handmade ornaments. A few years ago, before I started knitting, I bought a kit from (I think) Bead Sphere for netted ornament covers. There were three covers in the kit. I made one for that year's ornament exchange, and the rest got shoved inside something somewhere. I uncovered the kit while I was working through the stuff from the craft room and, as the ornament exchange is this coming Friday, decided that if I just went ahead and made the ornament covers, I wouldn't have to figure out somewhere to store the kits! (Genius, I tell you.)

Everything I needed was still in the bag, including all the beads, the needles, and even my little square of Thread Heaven. So I plopped down at my desk and got to work.



It's easy enough - pick up this many beads, thread through this bead on the prior row, etc. etc. Quite simple, though these are size 11 beads, so very tiny. I finished the first one...



And went ahead and started the second.



It takes about 3 hours to do one of these, so I had to quit the second one in the middle and come back to it later, but I finished it on up and it's even prettier than the first one.



I did have a problem with both, however - despite the fact that I was SURE I pulled out enough string as directed, I ran out. This is sort of like running out in the middle of a long-tail cast on - one you've spent the last two hours working on. There's not really a good solution for it and taking all that netting out and starting over would NOT be easy. So...I did a Russion join. It doesn't work quite as well as it does in knitting, but as you can see above - it does work. I'm especially bitter that I ran outof yarn on the second one, though, since I made doubly sure to pull out extra.

I'll pop these over a couple of plain ol' spherical ornaments and they will be gorgeous, perfect for the ornament exchange. This is the best kind of purging.

And now, only one thing remains - my finished Melpomene!