Saturday, October 20, 2007

Broken

I am either in a major funk, or the enormity of cleaning out my craft room, combined with cataloging my stash on Ravelry has overwhelmed my urge to impulse shop. This past Monday was vendors' night at knitting guild. I think there were 10-12 vendors there, and I did not buy a single thing! I mean, there was all sorts of interesting wool - Applelaine, hand dyed Soy Silk, small vendors with hand-dyed, Koigu but nothing enticed me, not even close.

Today the 'wits got together for breakfast, then Heho, Annie and I headed down to Inspirations Needlecraft Show and *AGAIN* nothing! Quilters, and beaders, and fabric stores, and wool vendors and nothing even whispered to me.

To verify I was indeed broken, Heho twisted my arm to stop in at Yarn Forward our LYS and home of the super yarn pimp Lulu - and probably for the first time in history, I left empty-handed.

Sunday, October 7, 2007

Excited again

So it turns out doing bunches and bunches of garter stitch is really boring. I've been working on my friend's project for a couple of days now, and the progress was less than stellar. Part of it I'm sure is that I'm completely free-styling the colour changes, but the progress that I made over the past couple of evenings was duplicated in 2 1.5 hour car rides today. No I'm not insane, I have to do two matching sides and I figured this was the best and laziest way of making sure I will have enough yarn all around.

Anyways, the point of the post is that I have found something to get excited about again. I'm testing a new pattern for longies, and I'm doing it in double knitting. They are currently unpatterned, and I think that learning the increases and decreases for gussets etc will be challenging enough, but since I'm working in two colours anyways, I hope to be able to add some embellishments. Also, it appears that the instructions are written for knitting the front in one round and the back in another, so I'll see if I can modify that or if I'll be totally lost.

Now to find the wool for these little pants...

Tuesday, October 2, 2007

I'm still in my funk, and have done no knitting since I last posted. But here are the items I managed to finish last week:

Another pair of SheepyPants, in Galway Paint, with the Lettuce cuffs:


Another CurlyPurly soaker, in Ella Rae. I was really disappointed with this yarn, balled, it looked like there was bright red throughout, but in reality there were only huge swatches of it mixed with the pink and purple:


And I made up two of Mandy's hats (so adorable). The green one is the same Merino DK I used for the peapod jacket, and the other is Patons Classic Merino:


In the hopes that a change is as good as a rest, I have decided to pick up the Philosopher's Wool Poncho that I'm knitting for Nora. Fall is here and it would be nice if she could wear it. It is interesting in that there is no pattern for the colour changes, you are given 11 skeins of wool and you randomly select to work between one and six rows of any colour in any order. I am keeping track as I'm making a poncho for her, so both sides have to match. Garter stitch means it's easy peasy (I know, I thought I wanted to do something complicated, but I'm hoping big will do instead) so hopefully I'll be back on the baby knitting track next week.