It’s Almost My Birthday…Gimme Gimme Gimme
I am turning 30 next Friday, on the first of April. As usual, my birthday lasts at least a week (I’m that special) so today we’re celebrating by going out for a steak-and-egg breakfast at the local greasebucket, stopping off to pick up my favourite cake at the German bakery and driving up north to share it with our friends. Sometime between the breakfast and the cake we’ll be buying this! Hopefully I will suddenly be infused with a talent for composition and all my future knitting photos will be beautiful works of art.
Last night Jeremy and I went out to the bar for a couple of drinks and I got carded. I love it!
I’m almost finished Mariah…I’ve just got the hood left to knit and a bunch of seaming to do. I got a little bored of it so I knit another sweater at a bulky gauge with some pretty purple Galway double-stranded. Pictures to come.
I May Be Ornery
A lot of people seem to think this sweater is called Rouge. It’s not. It’s called Rogue. Rogueroguerogue. ROGUE. Give it a try.
Book Meme/Tag Thing
Thanks, Btchwstix. Memes like this are bad for me because now I have to either lie or admit how poorly read I am of late. I am not tagging anyone in return…so you can keep your trashy novel habits a secret.
Last Book Read: Uh, I think the last book I finished reading was Stitch N Bitch Nation. Yes, a knitting book.
Where It Came From: Chapters
Books Read Per Year: I used to devour books on a regular basis, often staying up until I finished the really good ones. Now I’m not as prolific. Maybe I read 35-45 books a year.
Favourite Genre: Before I would have said fiction with a bit of the mystical. Right now knitting books are my thang.
Favourite Books of All Time: Eh…fuck. I don’t know. I’ll give you two…one from my teenage years and one slightly more recent.
Fire and Hemlock - Diana Wynne Jones
The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
Felted Clogs are the Bomb
See? Pretty. One clog came out better than the other; one of them is much looser around the cuff and I’m going to have to cut a wedge out of the back and sew it together to make it fit better. Otherwise they are faboo. They’re still wet and I expect they’ll take a couple more days to dry which is frustrating because I want to wear them. Now everyone in my family wants a pair which is annoying because I don’t like knitting for others (I know, I’m going to hell), but these people put up with me daily so I guess I could give each of them 3 days of my life.
I knit the women’s large out of Galway and I think I could have gotten away with knitting the medium or small because at the end of the felting I wasn’t sure they were going to get down to size.
I managed to do the uppers with 1 skein, and the soles and cuffs took 2 skeins and a little bit. For the women in my family I’m going to be knitting the women’s medium which should take 1 and 2 skeins, respectively.
Clogs!
This weekend I knit up a pair of Fiber Trends clogs. After reading the pattern through I understood how they were constructed, but that was nothing compared to seeing them evolve as I was knitting. Such a neat and clever pattern! Right now they are in the machine, felting away. Tomorrow I’ll have some before and afters for you.
Yoke-o Oh No
I’ve been a good girl, working diligently on Mariah whenever I have knitting time. I’ve finally joined the pieces together at the yoke.
This took me a bit longer than I thought because I had to reknit part of a front panel. It turned out that I didn’t do the ribbing as high as on all my other pieces so I had to rip out all the stocking stitch to correct it. Now the stocking part looks like shit because reknitting with the Elann Peruvian isn’t as nice as knitting in the first place…the yarn has lost much of its loft. And considering it wasn’t too great to begin with…let’s just say I’m putting all my eggs in the blocking basket right now.
The yoke is going smoothly, if endlessly. I know it’s going to seem like nothing is happenening at all until half of the raglan decreases are complete, then the rest is going to fly by.
I wish I had decided to knit this out of something else, so I would still be enjoying the process even after the cabling is complete. The pattern really is very clever and intuitive, and as long as you read through the whole thing before you start you should have smooth sailing.
This is the first sweater on which I have attempted cables, and I was dreading the sleeves. It turned out that the sleeves were my favourite part for a change. I love cables…I’m getting quite clever at them.
