another one bites the dust

*sigh* These are 3 years old and I've worn/loved them so much that there's a hole in the heel. Cherry Tree Hill Supersock - one of my all-time favourite sock yarns.

moving on

The whole mitten fiasco is behind me. I'm not thinking or obsessing about it. I haven't frogged them yet because it's a two person job and I need hubby to help me. And I'm making him help me because it's his fault that his hands are freakishly large. Thanks to everyone for your words of sympathy & encouragement. The idea of sewing up the gusset is a good one but if I take away sts from the gusset, I have to add them to the palm otherwise, the mitten is too small. Curse his big hands!!!

And there was another near knitting tragedy. While rethinking hubby's mittens, I wanted to check something in the Anemoi charts and I couldn't find the PDF on my computer! I looked on both hard drives as well as the backups for the laptop and my old computer - nada. I was very close to having a heart attack. I finally plugged in the Shiny Blue Thing (my name for our external hard drive). I looked through all the backups and finally found it in the March backup of our previous computer. Bad hubby for not restoring all my files.

So moving on... Did you know that there's less than 45 knitting days til Christmas? Yep, it's officially crunch time. I am furiously working on Christmas projects. I finished a cowl yesterday and here's a craptastic picture (really dark yarn on a pouring rain day is really hard to photograph even with an Ott Lite):


Pattern: Turtle Tracks Cowl by Vicki Susan
Yarn: Queensland Collection Kathmandu Aran; col 117; 1 skein plus 4 yds of a second skein
Needles: 5mm Addis
Notes: Major errors in the pattern - only rows 2 & 16 are correct. So very annoying. Lucky for me, I've knit this lace pattern before so all I had to do was pull out the other chart and use that as a reference. If you want to knit this, email me and I'll send you a list of corrections.

ETA: I stand corrected. Vicki has made changes to the original stitch pattern that results in a column of garter stitch rather than a column of rev. stockinette. My apologies for misrepresenting her pattern.

No Ricky cowl picture because there's no natural light left in this part of the world (til next April). I immediately cast on another cowl.


The yarn is Berroco Peruvia Colors. I am using the same yarn but the unpainted version for the Mondo Cable Cardi. There is quite a difference between the two even though they're both Peruvia. The dyed version is very similar to Malabrigo.

I will officially start Christmas shopping tomorrow when hubby and I head out to a huge Christmas market. It's all about high end handmade items. I haven't told hubby yet but a local dyer will be there selling yarn (and her handwoven shawls & capes). I'm pretty sure that I'll buy yarn from her.


Phoebe sez, "I want bigger cat furniture for Christmas"

tragedy

It has been a tragic knitting week for me. I got my first hand knit hole:


I am very sad. The hole isn't too big and I still have some yarn so I can repair the heel. But the yarn is so soft (lots of cashmere) that they probably won't hold up for too long. Sigh...

Here is the second tragedy:


I started the thumb and it's too big.


No amount of fiddling will make it right. The gusset is the right length but the opening is too big. These have to be frogged and reknit. I am so disappointed.

I know better

... than to sleep on my back because Phoebe will walk all over me. She will stand on my stomach and survey the lay of the bed and finding no other flat spot, she'll flop down and purr so loudly that it will wake me up (not that it makes a difference since I'm already awake from 12lbs of pointy paws pressing on my belly). And when I try to suck in a breath to restore some oxygen to my body, she will jump off my gut rendering me even more breathless.

... than to go to Costco when I'm hungry. I bought $40 worth of cheese. Grilled cheese sandwiches anyone?

... than to buy a huge box of Halloween candy. The doorbell rang 3 times for a total of 7 trick-or-treaters. Now I have to finish off the leftover candy. Darn!

... than to expect the cats to understand the end of daylight savings. The phrase, "It's not time to feed you" is met with plaintive meows of hunger even if I do drag my butt out of bed at 6am.

... than to play Xbox games right before I go to bed. Talk about wicked dreams.

... than to leave any food on the kitchen counter. Ricky will find it the 30 seconds that I'm gone and eat it. He should be sick in 3, 2, 1.

... than to ignore the part of my brain that says these socks look wrong. I had hubby put them on his size 13 feet and they fit. The socks are supposed to fit size 10 feet. So I had to rip back both toes and reknit.


Pattern: standard top down sock
Yarn: ONline Supersocke 6 ply; colour Cottage 1080; 1 skein (150g/410 yds)
Needles: 2.75mm dpns

Happy Halloween!

Ricky sez, "Who is this strange and furry creature? And why do I have the urge to run away?"

PS. No cats were harmed in the taking of this picture. Pooh might've suffered some damage...

brown penguin

Despite my best intentions, the mittens are not done. Hubby's birthday has come & gone and I still have at least half a mitten left to knit.


If you look on the palm of the first mitten, you can see a glaring boo boo. I'll have to duplicate stitch over it because I don't feel like ripping back.


If you decode the left palm, it says, "Hello World!". If you don't understand the significance of the phrase, Wikipedia has an excellent explanation. Hubby picked it, not me. What a geek! When I started the second mitten I decided to encode my own message into the palm. Hee hee!

My MIL returned home late last week so things have been getting back to normal. I finally delivered the Anemoi mittens to their new owner. Sadly, she was asleep with a bad cold so I handed the mittens over to her husband. He put them on and noted that they fit. Hmmm, she'll have to make sure he doesn't steal them!

After I dropped off the mittens, I treated myself to a little yarn therapy. The LYSes really were on the way home!


The red skein is some sort of Fleece Artist/Handmaiden sock yarn. I think it might be sea wool. The two skeins of Kauni are the same colour eventhough they don't look the same. And the big white blob is undyed Dream in Color Smooshy which will probably be used for more fair isle. Can you tell that I'm hooked?

Pooling diamonds and fall leaves

It's fall, the season of pumpkins, pumpkin pie, turkey dinner (we've already had our Thanksgiving dinner here in Canada) and, of course, lots of knitting!

Andrew and I went to the pumpkin patch with his Grade 1 class. This photo was taken when the rain had taken a brief intermission down to a light mist. About 10 minutes after this, the skies opened, and the wind came on, and we had sideways rain and rain so hard that it actually bounced off the puddles and mud and you had to call it upside down rain. (Yes, we probably have about 50 different terms for wet precipitation in this town.)

And then last night, there was more rain and wind, and when we came out this morning, our cherry tree had dumped half its leaves into the yard. So the boys and I raked up a lot of it, and they had a little bit of a leaping competition. (Andrew won.)

And I've been knitting on another pooling project, so I'm pleased to offer up another pattern. This one's going to Angela in San Francisco. I first met her on Ravelry when I ran out of yarn for my Icarus shawl, and she offered to wind off some for me and send it to me.

She sent me this skein of yarn as a surprise treat for me, so I turned it into a stole and I'm sending it back to her -- and you get a free pattern out of it!

Pooling Diamonds Stole

Here it is on Ravelry!



(Note: If you're new to the pooling technique, please read the first pattern in this series to get a good idea of how to figure out where your yarn will pool.)

Using an "e" or backwards loop cast-on, cast on 83 stitches onto a US7 needle. Please see my previous posts about figuring out your own "magic number" for your tension on the needles you've chosen. For this pattern, it's pretty easy to subtract pairs of edge stitches if you need to use fewer stitches to get the pooling to happen.

Knit garter stitch for 6 rows.

Start working with the chart below. The stitches in yellow are your garter edging. My edging had 3 stitches in it, but your edging will be different depending on your stitch tension, so please add or subtract stitches as you need to.

(Click on the chart to get it in a larger, more printable size.)

End with a Row 9 or a Row 19.

Knit garter stitch for 6 rows.

Bind off very loosely using a sewn bindoff, to maintain the pooling.

Block and pin out the stole. I added light scallops for interest, though you can also pin it out flat.

(For this project, I used Wollmeise 80/20 Twin yarn in Versuchskaninchen 1. It has a little less yardage than its 100% cousin, so this stole blocked out to almost 5' long, as compared to the almost 6' length that I get from the 100% superwash yarn. But it was worth it to discover that this yarn has a lovely, silky feel to it.)


And here's a sneak peek at my next pooling stole colourway -- Wollmeise 100% in Okzident.