Needles & Hooks

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Today I knit while working.

I working on a very large report. And some of it is at the point where I’m reviewing page proofs. So, I carefully read a bunch of pages and lift a pen occasionally to mark something. I also had a simple stockinette-in-the-round project with me, so I figured, what the hell. I pulled it out and knit while I was proofing. A few people came into my office about other parts of the report while I was doing it. No one said a word. Sadly, tomorrow I’ll have to do a lot more interactive editing, so probably won’t get a chance to knit because I’ll be too busy typing. Oh well, fun while it lasted.

Also, I wanted to let you all know that my stash sale will start tomorrow at 3pm, EST. I’ve got 38 different things that are looking for new homes and all the money goes to benefit my 3-Day Breast Cancer Walk. You don’t pay me, you pay them! So you get fiber goodies and a tax donation all in one! Don’t forget to look early before all the good stuff goes!

This month I had intended to post every day. And I made a good show of it until Friday. When I spent all day and a good chunk of the evening working, and I didn’t have anything stored up I could post about and I didn’t feel it was right to post “Sorry, no knitting here” just to mark off that day in the calendar.

And yesterday was mostly devoted to working on the divorce. The NEH (nearly ex-husband) came over and we worked on practical things. Like taxes, and divorce paperwork, and separating accounts, and all those other 1-becomes-2 things. At some point, he said “so, I get half your yarn”. And I replied with “okay, I’ll trade you for half your beer” (he’s a home brewer). We decided it was a fair trade.

I also spent an hour+ dealing with the cruel joke of a snow storm we got. Last Wednesday it was nearly 60 degrees. And the small pile of snow that lived at the edge of my driveway finally melted and I covered the lawn with lime and fertilizer and new grass seed. Then Friday dumped 6 inches on us followed by rain. While NEH worked on the taxes, me and my tiny little gerbil-powered snowblower pushed our way through all that wet/icy snow (also a fair trade, I think). My driveway goes up a hill (basement garage), and at the very top was the worst where the city plows piled up the ick. As I was attacking that with a shovel, my neighbor flagged down a roaming plow truck and paid the guy $30 to scoop out her car. As he was turning the truck around for another pass at her house, he pulled up next to me. I told him I was okay, I was almost finished. He said he’d clean it up for me “A present for the red-haired girl on St. Patrick’s day”. How could I argue with that?

So anyway, a day that was long and productive. And mostly non-emotional. And really, all about becoming Me again. But by 8pm, I was more than ready to sit and stitch. So I worked My sister’s geisha wrap with My yarn on his couch (he gets that), watching My Tivo with My cat. And I crawled into My bed around midnight, not having posted to My blog at all. So, this makes up for it some.

I’ve signed up to walk the Breast Cancer 3-Day Walk. It’s a 60-mile walk over 3 days, and this year I’ll be walking in San Diego in November. This is my 3rd year participating and I have to do a bit of fundraising. There will be a number of ways you can help, including a stash sale that I’ll be launching shortly and a pledge drive with prizes that I’ll announce later on.

But first I need to know what to do with some of the pink novelty yarn in my stash.

I have a variety of balls I got in a pink grab bag once. I intended to do something with them for my 2005 3-Day walk but didn’t get around to it. So I still have them. Think I should offer them up in the stash sale? Think I should make boa-like scarves with them and offer those as incentives somehow? Got any other ideas? I’m all ears. Or eyes as the case might be…

Yesterday I went down to NYC for a friend’s masquerade party. I was driving down and I brought the geisha wrap project for my sister because I thought I might want something mindless for a few spare knitting moments (which never materialized - and darned if I don’t know how to drive and knit).

Anyway, I saw something in the latest issue of the British magazine Simply Knitting on Twice Knit’s blog. And so I made sure to swing by my local Borders on the way out. I wasn’t sure if the local one carried it (I find that not all Borders do and I don’t know the formula), but I knew that I pass a store in Connecticut that does if I couldn’t find it. I was in luck. So first I present you with my find:

Which contained these:

If you must know, that’s Issue 25, March 2007. There are still a few issues at my local Borders and I might be convinced to go fetch them…(it’s $9 plus tax and yada). This issue had the patterns for the horse, sheep, and cow; pigs and fowl will be in issue 26.

Anyway, one of the neat things about Simply Knitting is that they often include freebies with the issues. This time, it was a magnetic needle case with a few pins and needles. That’s where the rescue came in.

My friend Marta had this gorgeous mask that she was planning to wear to the party. Problem was, it was mounted on stick, and well, she’d have to hold the stick somewhere, um, unpleasant. So she wanted to remove the stick and attach something to tie it on. After some careful surgery to remove the stick, she was at a loss for what to tie it on with. She wanted some sort of ribbon, but we couldn’t find any in the shops in her neighborhood. So I offered a small length of one of the ribbon yarns I was using for geisha. It wasn’t quite the right color, but it was good enough. She poked careful tiny holes in the mask, but was unable to force the ribbon through them. And asked me if I had a yarn needle or something. Well, I hadn’t brought my usual sack of gear with me, because geisha really only needs scissors. But then I remembered my new Simply Knitting needle case. The needles aren’t as good as Chibi bent-tips, IMHO, but they got the yarn on her mask. Isn’t she beautiful?!

There’s been a lot of silence around here lately, due to some major upheavals in my life. In short February 2007 has sucked and I’m glad it will soon be over.

The day I got back from weeks and weeks of working in Los Angeles, my husband and I decided that we should end our marriage. It was a mostly good run, we had some wonderful times together, but the last couple of years have been pretty painful and we feel like we would do better apart now.

A week after that, last Saturday, our beloved cat, Chutney, passed away. She had Chronic Renal Failure for a couple of years and was slowly declining. But the end was sudden and sooner than we expected. I’ve never been a knit blogger who focuses on my cats, but you can visit her memorial for photos and memories.

So, this weekend, I’m heading home to Michigan to spend a few days with my sisters. I’m scheduling a trip to Threadbear Fiber Arts in Lansing. A place I’ve wanted to visit since before it opened. After I get back, there will only be a couple of days left in this horrible month.

I have done plenty of knitting this month, I hope to start sharing it soon. For now, I’ll leave you with the hat and scarf I finished for my husband. Tying off loose ends, if you will. The scarf is a simple herringbone stitch. The hat is a tight rib. Both are made with Burgundy Brown Sheep Lambs Pride.

I’m back from my cruise. First, the disclaimer. It was this cruise. Yes, a cruise featuring Barenaked Ladies (the Canadian band). I’m a huge fan, I’ve seen them perform close to 50 times (I have to do a new count after the last tour and seeing them 4 times on the ship), and a pile of my friends and I were on the cruise together. It was non-stop fun. So, the projects I worked on recently all had to do with the cruise in some way.

First, there is this cross-stitch piece for a couple I know (glamour shot in the hotel room):

Close-up:

As you might have guessed, it’s from Subversive Cross-Stitch. I planned ahead before I left home and brought the floss and some spare Aida 14. A trip across the street from my hotel to Bed Bath and Beyond got me a frame. A wash in the hotel sink, lay out to dry on a towel while at work (wonder what the maid thought?!), and the room iron and board and it was all done. And the recipients loved it.

There were a few other gifts to give on the boat, not all of which I remembered to photograph. I made a silly wire and bead pendant that was very much an inside joke kind of thing. I made a neat spiral crochet bag for a birthday gift (and I should be getting the photo soon). But the best was my agony in air travel novelty fur scarf.

I needed to flesh out the gift of the silly pendant, so, seeing as Michael’s was selling most of their novelty yarn at steal prices, I decided to make a long boa scarf out of Bernat’s Boa yarn. 12 stitches wide and 2 skeins long. I cast on the night before I left and made sure I liked the width and then packed it up. But let me back track a bit.

As you might remember, I’m in Los Angeles on an extended work stay. The Friday before my cruise was my last day working. I checked on my flight to Miami and found that American Airlines’ website had no record of it! I called my secretary who called our travel department who said that something had screwed up but that it was all fixed and I should see the flight on the web in 30 mins. I did. So on Saturday I went about packing and getting ready. I spent some time getting the best seat assignment possible, and then I shut it all down and dropped some stuff off at a friend’s house for storage. Then I woke up early on Sunday for my flight from Los Angeles to Miami.

When I got to the airport, the computer wouldn’t let me check in. The self-service agent said there was a problem with my ticket and had me wait in line for a real agent. Fortunately, I’m Gold on AA, so I had a short line. The agent told me that I didn’t have a ticket. “But I have a seat assignment!”, I replied. After some tears (on my part), some heroics (on the agent’s part), and a Platinum MasterCard (on my part), I was in my assigned seats on the overbooked flight with no time to spare. While she was processing my charges, she had me run my large suitcase down to the other end of the terminal to leave it with TSA before they closed out the flight. I ran through security (also a Gold benefit), made a quick panicked call to my secretary, and got on the plane. I finagled the seat next to my best friend and we watched The Queen and Arrested Development and I worked through one ball of the Boa.

We landed in Miami and made our way to baggage claim. Now for the moment of truth. My bag was one of the first off the plane! Yay! So I camped out with our stuff and pulled out Boa, ball 2, and kept knitting while K looked for her bag. And looked. And looked. And I finished the 2nd ball. And her bag wasn’t there. The sum of the story is that we waited for the next flight from L.A., we went back in the morning before the cruise and checked the two red eyes, we called AA and they can’t trace the bag because despite putting 12 bar codes on it, they don’t actually scan bags as they get on and off planes. No more planes are due in before we have to get on the boat, so we go shopping for K and buy her new clothes and toiletries. AA only agrees to pay $75 because they’ll have the bag to us tomorrow; “um, we’re supposed to be at sea tomorrow”. We had one port of call, AA didn’t get the bag there. Fortunately, K bought clothes for the whole cruise. And her bag was in Miami on Friday when we returned.

Okay, so that was a long digression. Anyway, I knit a few stitches on the boat. A scarf I’ve been working on. No great “places I’ve knit” photo with the Atlantic in the background however. Didn’t want to get sunblock on the yarn. I didn’t start the project I’d intended to. But tonight is new Gilmore Girls and Veronica Mars, so maybe then.

This one includes pictures.

First, last I posted, I mentioned I was doing Weavette squares for this year’s ornament. And so I did. Here it is on the tree.

What I did was make two squares, one including beading, and then crochet them together with some stuffing. The beading was the trickiest part. I made a blank white square first and then I used markers to note which top strings I wanted to put beads on. Then I made sort of a pattern on paper per vertical string:
- String 1: (down) 2 green 2 red
- String 3: (up) 4 green 2 red
- String 5: (down) 1 color 4 green

And so on. The things you have to note are that there are two sets of vertical strings, even numbers and odd numbers, so I had two sets of lists. Further, you’re winding up and down, so that’s why I listed which direction the strings were going. Finally, I strung all the beads onto my yarn before I started winding the weavette. Making sure to swap which order I loaded the beads depending on whether the string was up or down. Then, with my loaded yarn, I wound the Weavette. When I placed a vertical that had beading, I slid those beads down. When I did the final weaving, I’d move the beads into place before running the needle. Took a bit of fussing, but comes out neat.

Here’s a close-up:

And here’s the back (my initials and year in backstitch):

On Jan 2, I came back out to L.A. for more work. I’m away from home until Mid-February working on a project out here. The days are long and tedious. I’m on site by 8:30am and I usually don’t get back to my hotel until about 7pm every night. I’ve done a little knitting, but not nearly what I’d hoped.

But there is a break in site. Tomorrow I leave for a cruise! So I’m in the middle of putting everything on hold while I’m gone. I’m sorting things for “leave behind” and “take on cruise”, I’m doing a ring check of my section of the knitting blog ring, I’m doing a gauge swatch for a project I want to do on the cruise, I’m listening to vintage Madonna, and I’m playing the very addictive FizzBall. Somehow I’m not good at focusing on any one of these activities, so I click on a blog, knit a row while I wait for slow hotel downloads, then play a round of Fizz.

And I have to give up my laptop in an hour so that I can stash some stuff at a friend’s house while I’m gone. See you all later!

That’s where time has gone.

Last I posted, I was gearing up to head to Seattle for a bit of vacation, then to Los Angeles for several weeks of work. And I had fun in Seattle. Went to the Acorn Street yarn shop where I got yarn and some needles and made a couple of scarves for my friend K while we were road tripping. Of course, I took no photos of my finished products.

I also packed my yarn for my holiday ornaments and to work on my Ribby Cardi. But then I got to L.A. And didn’t knit a stitch. I had long days of work, evening meetings, and then all I could manage to do was sit in the hot tub a bit and read before crashing.

I got back home on Saturday and assessed my ornament situation. And swung into high gear on something different. Now I’m making little pillows with my Weavette. Two squares, one beaded, crocheted together and stuffed. I’m in a mad rush to finish them this afternoon so that I can pack them off in the boxes that must be shipped by 5pm. Fortunately, just a bit of crochet left. I’ll take a photo of the one I keep and post it. I swear I will.

And then I’m taking a few days off for sloth. Where sloth will include some knitting. And maybe some organization of my yarn closet which has gotten out of hand. I’m a yarn black hole right now. Yarn comes in, and stays.

Also, I have to work some more on the Ballerina spreadsheet. Those who have it so far have caught up with me!! Eek! And I have a ton of requests for Mermaid and Ballerina sheets to fill. And fill them I will.

Wow, so it’s been forever since I posted. I got consumed by work and had very little time for knitting, much less posting about it. But I did do some knitting. In fact, I learned double-knitting, unvented a 2-color crochet cast on for it, and knit a cool double-knit hat.

I also started a Ribby Cardi and fixed one of my sister’s two socks. I got 2 (!) more Rockin’ Sock Club packages and signed up for next year’s Club. Oh, and cleaning out my comment spam catcher, I got spam from Unicef?!

I’m currently in Los Angeles on work travel, so I can’t post photos, but had some time waiting for experiments to run, so I thought I’d post. I fly home tomorrow, and I think I’ll be knitting the last stitches on Mermaid on the plane!

Now to go catch up on about 2000 Bloglines posts. I wonder when I’ll just give up. Anything special I shouldn’t miss?