Woolly Interlude

I thought I would highlight the mistake. In that circle, there’s a blob of knitting where there’s supposed to be a YO or two. But I still love it.

I’m pretty excited about my plans for the weekend; in addition to knitting and leaving my apartment occasionally, I plan to reorganize my crafty corner. I had it pretty well in hand before Christmas, but there is now an explosion of yarn and sewing notions, and I’ve discovered that if I want to have continuing access to any of those sewing supplies, I’ve got to reorganize. Plus, I still have some bare walls, and who says organization can’t be synonymous with decoration? You just have to get a little creative with it, which is what I intend to do this weekend. If the weather is nice enough for photography, I will have pictures of the reorganized area to share soon. And if I don’t? Feel free to bug me about whether or not I finished the job.

In other news, I took my computer back in to be fixed (again!) so that between the two of us, Heather and I might manage to have one laptop that can be considered “portable” (and also, more than one that is “functioning”). Fortunately, I have a job that allows me to read knitting blogs and post here when I want to, so I don’t have to go through withdrawal or anything.

This week has been a little bit hectic at work, but I’m still really enjoying my job, as I expected I would. I know my boss has been worried that I get lonely here alone all day, or that I’m disappointed that I’m not meeting a lot of people through work, but that’s so not the case. I feel like I get more done when I’m alone, because even though I take occasional blog reading breaks, there’s no one here to talk with. Plus, I’ve been told in the past that I can be a bit of a control freak (what?! not everyone has a specific way of arranging glasses in a cabinet?), and being able to organize everything exactly the way I want to without having to worry about anyone else messing it up is really nice.

Here it is (thank you sunny sky on my lunch hour!):

My second finished Adamas Shawl.

Project details:
• Pattern by Miriam Felton
• Yarn: JaggerSpun Zephyr Wool Silk in Cinnabar, from Sarah’s Yarns, an online shop I would highly recommend. And also, I highly recommend the yarn, it’s one of my favorites.
• Needles: KnitPicks Options circulars, size US 5

I started this shawl last October, ended up ripping it out at some point in late November, and restarted it early in December. Then I stopped working on it so that I could finish up some Christmas knitting, and it became my January project for the UFO Resurrection Challenge. I finished and blocked it this weekend, and since it’s not for me, I’ll be sending it on it’s merry way soon.

Of course, observant lace knitters will notice that there is a mistake visible just below the center of the photo. I noticed it while I was knitting, and fudged it as best I could, but at that point, my lifeline was a couple of repeats down, and I couldn’t face ripping back that much lace, especially as the rows get longer the closer you are to finishing the shawl. For the less observant out there, I managed to catch the mistake (completely unintentionally) in the close up photo I took.

Did you catch it? While I don’t think any of the lace I’ve turned out has been technically perfect, even an error this small will not be tolerated in the next big piece of lace I’m planning… but more on that later. For now, the great light made me giddy this afternoon (even if it was 29ºF), so I have another picture to share. Seriously, I don’t think this yarn has ever photographed so well, what with the sheen coming off of the silk and the whole red being nearly impossible to photograph accurately thing. So here’s the shawl draped over an armrest. I love the way blocking makes the lace so airy!

This has totally been the weekend of finishing things! Of course, that means it was also the weekend of watching TV, and it was unfortunately the weekend of having a bit of a cold and pretty much sitting on the couch for way too long. So, I give you the weekend in movies and knits (and a crochet, too, for good measure).

We start with The Two Towers Platinum Extended Edition, which is a very long movie. This produced a lovely crocheted coaster, as well as a knit hat.

Here we have a single crocheted coaster. I used KP Shine Sport in some bright pink I had lying around, and made a double crochet circle with a single crochet edging. See, I still crochet! I only made one, because I’m taking it to work to put on my desk. As I’m the only one there, I only need one coaster, right?

As that only accounts for 15 of 223 minutes, I finished off the movie by making a hat out of Rowan Tapestry, a single-ply yarn made of 70% wool, 30% soy fiber. Being a native Iowan, I naturally love soy and soy products (except for tofu, and soy “milk,” and roasted soybeans), so I had to get some of this yarn, and I got colorway SH 171. Because that’s meaningful.

Of course, the only picture I got is of the hat in progress. I’m planning a matching scarf, so this yarn will be appearing again on this blog. For the hat, I just made a garter stitch rectangle and sewed it up to make a hat that stripes vertically.

After those two FOs, I devoted myself wholeheartedly to finishing the red Adamas shawl, my very first project for the UFO Resurrection Challenge. Of course, it’s not blocked yet, but I have summarized the last of the knitting below.

I modified the pattern, only repeating the main chart 12 times before doing the edging chart, which means that this weekend, I had to do two pattern repeats, the edging, and the bind off. That’s a total of 42 32 rows, which in most patterns isn’t that much. With a lace shawl that grows as you knit it, however, these forty thirty-two rows take a very long time. Measured in the inimitable unit of time known as television, they took this long: Return of the Jedi, The Truman Show, Groundhog Day, Dances With Wolves, Ghostbusters, What a Girl Wants (yes, I’ve seen this movie… twice), half of Footloose, and two hour-long episodes of Mythbusters.

And having admitted that, I feel kind of pathetic. But the upside is this:

Now all I have to do is block it and go to bed, so that I can finish sleeping off my cold before work tomorrow.

I know, I know, I said I’d update. But seriously, my computer tried to kill itself, and is now in the repair shop, so I’m borrowing my roommate’s. Because I’ve been making lots of progress this last week, since I’ve pretty much just been knitting.

So what do we have here? Well, I sewed an apron, and I knit a bunch of dishcloths (and I’ve got more in store), a scarf, a hat, and I’ve got a couple of things in progress. I’ve pretty much been knitting simple stuff, like my first mitered garter stitch squares, but I’ve started the second reincarnation of that red Adamas shawl. The first one, well, it self-destructed, and I lost all motivation to knit anything but garter stitch. But then I checked Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince out of my local library as a book on CD, and I knit and listened to about half of that until my computer stopped. I haven’t worked on it since, but I will soon. I’d love to finish it this week, as I think I’m starting a real job on Monday. Amazing, huh? I haven’t officially accepted yet, so it’s still just an offer, but it’s nice to walk in for an interview and pretty much get a job. And once I accept it, I have to turn down another. Six months of no interviews, and now I’ve got my pick? Like I said, amazing.

Tonight, I’m going to watch Return of the King, knit some more garter stitch, and smile like a fool.

I knit a couple more repeats on my newest Adamas shawl tonight (because it’s close to the beginning, and a full repeat is not terribly time consuming). It was great fun, until I started making really stupid mistakes, unknitting half a row, making the same dumb mistakes, and repeat ad nauseum. Once I finally finished the blasted row correctly, I told myself it was time to stop with the lace for the night, and put something new up here. Fortunately for you all, my verbal skills are usually the last ones to go in the face of sleepiness, so I think that this post should make sense, even after I get some sleep.

Sorry about the terrible lighting, but I thought I should, you know, put up a picture anyway. This continues to be a fun project; I love the pattern, I love the needles, I love the yarn. It’s Zephyr Wool-Silk, and it’s still that same 1 lb. cone I’ve had since the beginning of June. You can see part of the cone in the picture; it seriously looks as if I haven’t used it at all. My best guess is that it’s not quite half gone, and I’ve already knit Birch with it and given 1400+ yards away. Of course, I started with over 5000 yards, so I guess I shouldn’t be so surprised that there’s so much left. But seriously, if you’re a budget knitter, you can get 2.86 miles of this yarn for less than $40. That’s a lot of knitting.

I hope to work on legs for the little eggy dudes tomorrow, but we’ll see. I’ve got a lot of cleaning and organizing to do, and unfortunately that needs to take priority over yarn. Or, at least, I’m trying to convince myself it does.