Turning these tumblin’ tumbleweeds
Into fabulous felted beads
Category Archives: Antics
Market Flop
I finished the body of the crochet market bag I’ve been working on, but I don’t really like it as much as I thought I would. I added in a few single crochet stripes before the large single crochet border and somewhere in those stripes, I must have added stitches because the top of the bag flares out in a way that really bugs me.
I’m thinking about ripping back a few rows and just doing the solid top single crochet border without the stripe rows. I think I’ll use the bag more if I’m not concerned about all the extra flared floppiness.
In sweater design news, I’m currently contemplating exchanging some yarn I bought a while ago with a different pattern in mind. I have 14 balls of Knit Picks Swish Superwash, but they’re in two different colors. I think I want to send them back and get a non-superwash yarn for this sweater. Might be time to try out their City Tweed.
Stripy Socks The Second
A while back, when I was about halfway through the swallowtail shawl I was presented with a knitting conundrum. I was getting ready to leave for a weekend trip to Vermont with a big group of friends, one of them being a new knitter. I didn’t want to bring the swallowtail shawl, cause I can’t exactly knit lace from charts and socialize at the same time without making mistakes. That was the perfect excuse for me to cast on for some no-nonsense stockinette stripy socks!
The yarn is Vesper Sock, and I’ve had it for quite a while. I probably bought it back in my yarn-binging days of 2007. I’ve knitted socks with this yarn before (a pair for Joey- blue, red and brown stripes) and now its my turn to get a pair of stripy socks. I’ll be doing an afterthought heel on this pair as well, which I think is the best way to do a heel with self-striping yarn.
The afterthought heel is super easy- when you get to the point where you want to start the heel, you knit half the stitches on one round with waste yarn (the yellow line of stitches in the pic above). Then, after you’ve finished the leg, you remove the waste yarn and put the live stitches back on your needles and knit the heel. (I just decrease like you would for a toe, and it comes out pretty well.)
And just so you can see what was going on outside my window while I was snapping sock pics on my dirty windowsill:
Trash Day!
If You Can’t Beat ‘Em
I really haven’t made progress in my knitting over the past few weeks, mainly cause this guy likes to sit right on my lap and bonk my knitting out of the way with his rather large nose. Then we proceed to snuggle. He always wins.
A Google-Chat With Joey
So I got an email that the color of yarn I ordered for Joey’s Smokin’ Cardigan is out of stock- so I signed onto Google Chat while he was at his recording studio internship to see what color he liked best:
me: can you go to this page and tell me what color you want? your yarn color was out [Here’s a link in case you want to play along]
Joey: Okay lets play a game. you tell me which color you like and we’ll see if we picked the same color.
me: sage is my number 1 choice wine is number 2
Joey: Yeah lets go with sage
me: was that your first?
Joey: Nah girl. I was playing you fool.
For some reason when I look at the small images of the color I can’t decide which one would work best.
me: yeah… me either.
Joey: Cause if I picked my favorite color it might look stupid as a sweater
Maybe we should do bright red cause I like that a lot.
Like the color of my guitar.
me: well, there’s only the one bright red on the upper right hand corner, is that the one? “Red”
Joey: Maybe a little too pinkish
Lets go with your original instinct.
me: but will that be too boring? you could prolly rock “persimmon”
Joey: maybe I could rock Persimmon.
me: what about turquoise? that might be uber hip
Joey: Hey I’m down. You know I’ll wear anything.
I need a good producers sweater.
me: Music producers wear turquoise cardigans?
Joey: This one might
me: You gotta make the final decision. I can’t be held fully responsible for you walking around rocking a turquoise cardigan… 🙂
Joey: haha. I really don’t know. Go with your gut.
me: okay, then it’s gonna be turquoise. speak now or forever wear your bright-ass turquoise sweater.
Joey: Lets do it.
me: lets do it
Going Home
Joey and I went back to Texas last week to visit our families since we didn’t get to see them over the holidays. It was a really nice trip and we enjoyed seeing both our families.
We visited with the cows:
We got to watch Daisy prove that she’s a farm dog now:
And we rode the horses:
City Slickers
You might recognize Doc, the darker, taller horse. My parents have had him for about a year now. They recently got another horse named Scooby. Scooby has lung disease and wheezes a lot, but he is a really sweet and gentle horse and I’m glad that he has a nice family to take care of him. I discovered that when he’s trotting and you squeeze your legs to try to keep from falling off, he runs faster like horses are supposed to do when you squeeze their sides!
Doc had an itchy face and found the perfect place to scratch it:
I was a little too busy to get any knitting done. I tried a little, but its hard to carry on a conversation when you’re keeping track of armhole and neckline decreases, all while maintaining a waffle stitch pattern. I hope to finish off the body this week and start on the sleeves…
I think I can count on Henry's help.
Preparedness
Having lived most of my life in Texas, I’ve been a little weary of my first winter up north. Last week we got a small tidbit of fall-like weather, with the nighttime temps dropping into the 40-degree range. I thoroughly enjoyed feeling the crisp air on my face while walking to the train station in the mornings, though I could also feel the crisp air whipping through my thin slacks. In the back of my mind I started to worry about how my walk to work would feel when it got really cold. The first time I visited New York it was in early February and it was bone chillingly cold, no matter how many layers I had on underneath my coat. During that trip, all the “New Yorkers” I saw seemed to be nice and toasty underneath their quilted down jackets and it stuck out in my mind that that is the kind of coat you need when you live up north.
Then yesterday I was out shopping when two guys pushed a rack full of coats onto the corner in front of the store I was exiting and started shouting, “Get your coats, Burberry, London Fog, Kenneth Cole, right here, ten dollars each, won’t last long!” and women started swarming the rack. I had been looking for a coat all day, eyeballing a long black down-filled one at Urban Outfitters for later purchase. (Once I had saved up the $218 it was gonna set me back.) I squeezed in with all the other crazed women and found to my surprise, a coat almost exactly like what I had been looking for. It was a size small, from Express and I grabbed it and handed the guy a ten dollar bill. He balled my new coat up and put it in a black plastic bag and shouted to the surrounding crowd, “Another one sold, get your coats right here, Burberry, London Fog, Kenneth Cole!”
When I got home, I tried it on for the first time. It is a little bigger than I was expecting, especially for a size small. The bottom two feet of the coat can be zipped off for a shorter coat if desired. It is very warm and when I wear it, I feel like George Costanza in that episode of Seinfeld where he has on this humongous coat and tells everyone, “Its Gore-Tex!” Later in the episode, he ends up knocking over an entire rack of wine at a shop because his coat is so huge and he can’t get around in the store. I dunno. I kind of think I might have overdone it with this coat. You tell me:
Ghastly Gargantuan or Terrifically Toasty?
I might feel differently when its 18 degrees outside and everyone around me is shivering while I’m cozy in my down comforter coat.
And speaking of being prepared for colder weather, Joey’s feet should be nice and warm as soon as I finish his second Stripy Sock:
Hello, I am a cute stripy sock. Please ignore my obvious laddering.
The errant line of blue is where I’ll be inserting the afterthought heel. Maybe I’ll try to take pictures of it- its really a neat way to do sock heels.
Love Is All You Knit 