Needles & Hooks

A couple of days ago I showed you the beginning of a beaded necklace. I was making it for my best friend, Kathleen’s 33 1/3rd birthday party. I only had 2 weeks notice, so I had to work fast. And, the party was in San Francisco, and I live in Boston. And she visited me for 5 of those days, so I couldn’t do it in front of her. So I worked on it where I could, even in a meeting or two at work! And on Friday, I boarded a plane to visit her.

In theory, it was rather simple: knit in the round, 10 beaded rows, 9 unbeaded rows, and a grafting bind-off. In practice, this is challenging. 400 beads on the thin cord, knitting with 000 needles, a very long grafting tail prone to tangling, trying to manage all of this in confined spaces. On the plane, I managed to finish the principal knitting. And because I had a window seat, I don’t think I bothered the woman next to me too much while grafting.

But the grafting wasn’t a dream. It might have taken longer than the actual knitting. Here’s what I was dealing with (the purple was my provisional cast on), each stitch I was grafting together had a bead on it:

I didn’t manage to dig out my camera on the plane, but I did work on the grafting while perched on a chair and a stool in her office in the library while she was leading an orientation. Note the tools of the trade: knees, small needle, scissors, phone, (iPod was out of the shot):

And as it turned out, I wasn’t able to finish it before the party. So I wrapped it anyway and gave it to her and finished it the next day. Her young cats were interested, but easily pushed away. Here’s the finished item:

And a couple of close-ups:

And finally, Kathleen wearing it:

Now, her party had a record theme. And I have always been the biggest record collector I know. My friends all had tapes. I needed the random access that a record gave me. When I wanted to listen to a song, I wanted it NOW!!! And in high school, I used to have hair down to my butt and sometimes, for kicks, I used to wear a 45rpm around my pony tail. As it so happens, my hair is currently long enough to put into a pony tail, and I still have that 45 I used to wear. But I needed a scrunchie to hold the record in place. An hour with a crochet hook and a ball of novelty yarn gave me this:

Which meant I looked like this for the party:

And in the ultimate in random access, Kathleen’s iPod played her 80s music collection on shuffle all night.

On the flight home, I got buried in Memoirs of a Geisha (the book), so I didn’t knit a stitch. So my Rock and Weave socks are calling to me. And another Rockin’ Sock Club package should be on it’s way shortly.

But something else was waiting for me when I got home today….

I immediately screwed together a needle and closed my eyes. This Addi Addict could actually be fooled. Maybe I’ll try them out on the other thing that was in the box….

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 11th, 2006 at 9:20 pm and is filed under Knitting, Beading, Almost Random, Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.