That is all.

Actually, I’m sort of in a permanent Summer Vacation. I don’t mind it, though - I’m getting a lot of the crafty things done I’ve wanted to do. Plus, my house is cleaner and I’m typically pretty caught up on laundry.

Gene’s been running triathalons and races. I go to as many as I can although sometimes they are on my work weekends. He’s started a blog that is mostly him summing up his training for himself, but his race summaries are fun to read, I think. I know the carb-loading, ankle-hurting, ice-bath-taking parts since I live with him. The race summaries are on the first page and his training posts are in the “Recently” tab. His latest race in Lake Geneva was very early (we left the house at 4AM) but very pretty.

I got some sock knitting done. What was really great about that was the looks I got from people, like I can’t believe you are knitting. You’re right - it’s totally weird to be knitting when there are a thousand people who got up at the butt crack of dawn to push their bodies to their physical limits. Somehow, knitting just doesn’t seem so strange in that context.

The socks I worked on were Gretchen’s socks. From last Christmas. They are, in fact, done now - as of yesterday, a mere 9 months after the Christmas they were due and in a yarn completely different from the original gift (which was yarn in wrapping paper that needed to be returned).

Schoeller + Stahl Sockina Cotton in the Earth Tones colorway, Jaywalker pattern by Grumperina. I’m quite proud of how close they ended up matching, stripe-wise. There was just the tiniest bit of difference in the stripe placement.

The yarn that was supposed to be her socks became a lace scarf for her instead. It was far too loose for socks; they would have never held up. She would have to wear them only when she wasn’t going to be on her feet. Since she’s a mom and works at a bank, that wasn’t very likely.

Cherry Tree Hill Glitter Alpaca in the Misty Moor colorway, Branching Out pattern by Susan Pierce Lawrence

Doing things for and with the family kept me pretty busy this summer. Gretchen and I decided that it would be fun for the girls to have a week here, each on their own. They got to plan what we were going to do and where we were going to go.

Emma came in July. We went to the Sears Tower:

We got to go to a baseball game:

Milwaukee Brewers Stitch and Pitch

We went to the Field Museum:

Sculpture - Man With Fish

We went to the Aquarium and saw fishes and dolphins and penguins (Emma’s favorite):

And saw The. Coolest. Tiles.

We went to American Girl and ate lunch in a room that was creepy, in a saccharine kind of way:

We went to the Hershey’s store, where I thoroughly embarrassed Emma, which is easy since she’s 12. Emma got the World’s Largest Cupcake:

And we also went to The Fold (I forgot my camera), saw a ridiculous historical marker that said, in effect, “nothing important happened here”, knit a lot and also made spindles:

Emma’s spindles.

In August, Natalie came. She was only here for 4 days, since she didn’t want to be away from home for a full week.

We went to a baseball game and got to see some Chicago team play her dad’s Detroit Tigers:

Chicago White Sox Stitch and Pitch

And saw a great view of the city from US Cellular Field:

We went to the Sears Tower:

We went to the Aquarium and saw starfish and turtles and dolphins (and stayed for the Dolphin Show):

We went to the Hershey’s store, where it wasn’t as easy for Natalie to be embarrassed and the guy wasn’t nearly as energetic:

We stopped in at American Girl but couldn’t get lunch, so we just looked around and got some rockin’ lip glosses and slippers (camera had died by then). We were in a million lines, and we went to the Disney Store where we got a Nemo that was nearly as big as Natalie. We also went to the beach, on our side of Lake Michigan where we collected many rocks.

Our craft project was to make necklaces. We didn’t get the cheap-o plastic beads, since Natalie is way too sophisticated for that. We got great crystal and natural wood beads and wire. I didn’t get a picture of Natalie’s, but this is a picture of the very first necklace I have ever made (that didn’t have macaroni beads) that I started with Natalie while she visited:

My mom was jealous and decided that she wanted to have a week at “Camp Aunt Jess”, too. So she came at the end of August.

We went to Stitches Midwest and didn’t win a single prize. Mom was pretty overwhelmed, but now she sees what she can do with knitting. We went to my knit night at Prairie Arts and Fibers. Mom got me a pretty great bowl (shown here with fiber in it):

We also worked on some sewing projects for 18th Century Reenacting:

Partially boned jumps in progess.

I can’t wait for next summer’s adventures!

Saturday, June 14th was WWKIP Day (World Wide Knitting in Public Day). This is my contribution to the effort (shot by Gene, my stalwart dive companion, with Nick and his mom, Carrie, a detangler extrodinaire, in attendance).

I said I’d work backwards. Wednesday night was George Clinton and P-Funk. Wednesday morning (2:30, to be exact) was our arrival home from Mexico, via the Houston airport. We spent a great deal of time in the Houston airport because of “storms” which we never saw. I managed to knit a lot while we were sitting there - the RPM socks from knitty, with some changes. This is the second time I made socks from this pattern - I made a pair for my mom for Christmas (which is working even further backward, but it relates:

A little back story on this pattern. When I first saw it last summer, I knew I must make it. The picture with the pattern has a Smith’s album - that’s the universe telling me to knit this pattern. I saved it and waited for the right moment. Shortly after the pattern came out, I went to the Midwest Fiber and Folk Festival in Crystal Lake. The Fold had a booth there and I saw this:

A moodier yarn cannot be found. It’s perfect.

I had the yarn, I had the pattern - but I had a million other self-imposed deadlines, including the aforementioned Christmas socks (I originally planned to make 7 pairs of socks before Christmas. I had 2 done in time. As of this writing, I still have 2 more pairs to go - and it’s June *sigh*). So the yarn and the pattern waited, patiently.

Fast forward to May 2008 and I know I will be spending hours on a plane and in busses and cabs and stuff. I pack my moody yarn and do a quick work up in my head of the pattern (it’s decently mindless). *Warning - technical knitting content*
I cast on 63 stitches and did a K5,P3 pattern all around until the heel, which is the standard slip stitch heel, then continued to the toe.
/end technical content

I decided to do a little photo montage of the traveling sock. This has become somewhat of a knitters’ convention, but it’s fun anyway, and the looks you get from people…priceless! Gene took the pictures. He’s such a good sport!

The sock sitting on a chair on the beach in Cancun:

The sock in front of the waves on the same beach:

The sock on a bus to Wet n’ Wild water park:

The sock on a stone turtle (they were outside our balcony):

And finally, the finished socks (on my new sock blockers!!!):

Ultimately, I made the socks in 10 days, 8 of them in Mexico (or on planes or in airports). In a fit of creativity I made the ribs on the socks run opposite each other. I’d read on Ravelry that this could be done by adding a stitch, which would of course work out mathematically, but I didn’t really want to make one sock any bigger on purpose - I tend to do that, anyway, without adding extra stitches. So I knit the 2nd sock in the round, but in the back so that the ribs would automatically go the other way. I’m quite proud of figuring that out! Of course, the second sock was tighter since I was using a different method, but it’s not super noticeable.

Incidentally, just like when I was trying to knit the Bayerische socks last year in Cancun, I lost a needle. Mexico is not kind to knitting - or knitters. Getting yarn in Mexico is pretty challenging; but that’s another story.

So I haven’t blogged in a while. It’s probably why I’m not a famous blogger. I’ve been busy since my snow day in December (my last post, almost six months ago). That’s not really the reason I’ve not blogged. I do blame Ravelry for a little of the delay, since the biggest reason I was blogging was to document my knitterly exploits. Now that I’m able to do that without all the tedium of communicating with others, I just haven’t bothered. We were also hacked a few months ago, which is the reason why so many of my pictures are lost; I annoyed our IT director to fix it for some time, saying my fan(s) needed me. He saw right through that and it was a couple of months before it came back to the state it is now. The sum of these parts is my bi-annual blog post today.

I’ll work backwards, since that’s the easiest way. Wednesday, I got to see this:

My general assessment - before George Clinton comes out, it’s like an average quality tribute band. He doesn’t bring out half the original band members until he comes out, which is about an hour into the show. It finally kicked up once he was on stage, but by then, we were exhausted and actually tired of beer. Imagine. He is amazing to watch, though - the whole dynamic changes when he is around.

Why was I tired? I visited Baltimore, New Jersey, Cancun and Houston on a crazy World Tour of my own and had only returned at 2:30 that morning. Luckily, I didn’t have to work.

Three sentences that say a lot, don’t they? For funness (yes, funness), I’ll leave it at that and see how long it takes me to come back.

Don’t hold your breath.

So I meant to post a few things sometime between October and now, but I have been more busy than normal. I have knitted a few things, but I can’t really say anything about them. So what will I write about? The weather.

I love the winter. I love the hunkering down, the solitude, the quiet. I love the sameness of the ground, with tiny, subtle surprises that stick out. I love the cold that bites cheeks and fingers. I love the smell of snow.

On my first day off in over two weeks, it snowed. The Universe does like me! It was a wet snow that day (Saturday) which precluded any picture taking. It eventually turned into ice, then rain, and it began to look a little like late February, which I don’t love. But then last night (naturally, just as I was driving home), the snow came down like glitter. Lots and lots of glitter.

So of course, I took pictures today.

You can see our pine trees, planted this past spring, were made for this.

I love love love the colors of winter. One of the colors in winter is white, the color of Emma.

She can be difficult to see, so I took a close up. Sasha, too loves the close up. Mostly because when I am outside, she has to be right near me. Or when I’m inside. She is a close-to-you kind of dog.

Not to be outdone, Pelli romped through the snow. She actually does this sort of bunny hop thing that is very funny to watch and very difficult to capture two dimensionally. She hates it when her belly is cold.

How did I manage to get these pictures? Isn’t it a school day? Well, yes, Virginia, it is a school day. But we had someone coming to the house to install a new thing, and someone had to be here when it was installed. It is a delightful little nightcap to the wonder that is a snowy day.

Oh, I did manage to get some pictures of knitting. I sewed in the ends of four more dishcloths, but two of them need blocked so only two are shown here.

And I took a picture of some super secret knitting in the snow. The full picture looks a little more like…well, what it is. In the meantime, you will have to enjoy this.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to have a blog that is mostly about knitting that doesn’t have any rea discussion of what I am knitting? Franklin Habit said it best here (he makes me laugh so hard coffee comes out my nose):

Christmas Knitting

On to knitting. Sherri and her five-year-old daughter Sydney will be coming over tonight to help decorate for the party Friday night. Funsies!

…but it’s close.

I got bored with the look of the site. Thoughts? I think the pictures look better this way, myself.

Ravelry

So I finally got my invite to Ravelry - it’s awesome! I have spent the better part of this weekend playing with it and looking at a million pictures of other peoples’ projects. The only problems I have encountered are completely of my own making.

1) I have a Flickr account. I had, until today, uploaded four pictures in three months. I wasn’t up on Flickr quirks - uploading up to the limit, and then deleting, does not clear the limit. This means I can’t upload the pictures I want until November. That’s the suck.

2) I am going to be confronted by my yarn and roving stash. Luckily, I won’t have to worry about the 80 bazillion pictures of it because of problem number 1.

3) I have a knitting notebook. I’ve never taken a single note. I’ve even been known to rewrite patterns that I had already printed out because I couldn’t find them. I’m…less than organized. Ravelry appears to be a place that might force me to organize my fiber crafts. I’m afraid. I’m usualy of the opinion that organization is a soulless attempt at controlling the universe. Ravelry may have caused a fundamental psychic shift. My world is slightly left of center now, and I find myself looking at my stash thinking, I have too much blue.

Projects

I will be slowly upoading my projects as I think of them or as I start them. For those who aren’t on Ravelry, either because they have not received their invite, or because they just don’t care that much about yarn, I will write a little bit today about my finished projects over the last several months.

So first, we have the baby set for the baby of an ex-employee. I haven’t actually given this to the baby - I might hold onto this, like I’ve held onto my Knitting Olympics project. I keep thinking that I will have friends who will have babies after I knit something. That would work out best for me.

I’ve made these before, for Taylor when he was a wee lad. I love the booties - I can just imagine a baby’s feet in them. These booties I made so that they would actually tie.

The next project is a Chemo Cap.

The idea behind this hat was to A) Use some yarn I already had; B) Create something bright and cheery; C) Try out a new pattern, and; D) Keep it soft since skin becomes more sensitive during chemotherapy. The yarn was left over from the JFGI wristbands. It’s Lion Brand Microspun. Splitty stuff, but very soft and washable. I also knit a flat flap for the inside so that it would be smooth on the person’s head. This was supposed to be given to a charity, but I didn’t have it done in time (big shock), so I’ll hold on to it for a while until the next chemo cap charity comes around.

Then we have the Skull Caps (the pattern is We Call Them Pirates from Hello Yarn). I love this pattern - it’s very easy Fair Isle since you can clearly see if you are doing it right.

I’ve actually made five of these, but I’ve given two of them away. One of them was like the purple and white ones, except that the purple was the ground and the skulls were in white. The other was pink, with a side of pink. Not my cup of tea, but since people have seen this hat, it’s become very desired in several groups of friends. I have a list of like 10 more of these to make. I’m taking a break to make socks, at the moment, but I’ll get back to the hats eventually. For some folks, I’ve asked them to give me the yarn they want me to use, since that’s the expensive part. I can churn one of these hats out in a week, but buying yarn for nearly 20 hats is a little expensive. I’m not collecting money for them, though, because the pattern is not for commercial use and also because it’s a thing I can do for my friends. I like the warm fuzzies.

Plus, seriously, how cool are these hats.

One of the other projects I’ve been working on in the last month or so is a series of dishcloths for Chris.

It’s sort of a building of a hope chest - as in I hope he finds his own apartment soon! It’s a little wierd to knit these while he’s around, since I haven’t actually told him they are his, but he’ll figure it out eventually. He’s also going to get a mat for his future kitchen. I have about 40 pounds of yarn, still (I bought 6 one-pound cones) so I might actually make a blanket, too. We’ll see what happens.

The kitchen pictures…well, I had to do dishes, anyway, so I figured, let’s see what these things look like in their habitat.

I’ve mostly been working on little projects this summer, although one of them might be considered epic. The Bayerische Socks were challenging, to say the least.

I’ve said a lot about these socks, but what I haven’t said is that they don’t fit me. I knit the first one and thought, rats, it’s a little tight. I thought they would actually be loose, since my gauge was a smidge big. Unfortunately, I knit the gauge in stockinette, and not the pattern. I kept going, though, because I had started, frogged, started, frogged and started again. I’d be damned if I was going to reknit the whole thing.

Mom, however, was thrilled. I finished them when I went to Toledo. I rode Amtrak, which is great when I’m visiting Toledo by myself. I don’t have to worry about traffic and with the price of gas, it nearly costs less than driving. The only drawback is that the train is never ever ever on time and it arrives at ridiculous hours of the morning. So since I got to knit for almost 6 hours uninterrupted, I managed to make some headway on the second sock.

Time spent at my parents’ house tends to be sit still time. Not in a bad way, but being there has a tendency to slow my metabolism to the point where I don’t get up very often. There is a coffee carafe on the table, a blanket on the couch, probably PBS on the tv…it’s nice. I managed to finish the second sock and I put them on. I wanted them to fit. I willed them to fit. They refused. I mentioned my psychic angst to my mom who said…oh, really. Her eyes were hopeful and I realized that I might, just might, have to give away my epic socks.

But mom, they’re made of wool. You are allergic to wool. Let me try them on anyway, she said. Oh, they aren’t scratchy at all, she said. But mom, aren’t they a little tight? Oh, they’re perfect, she said. They even have space for my toes.

*sigh* Mom got my epic socks because I didn’t get gauge. If nothing else has, that will teach me to swatch, swatch, swatch.

Incidentally, the Bayerische sock photos are courtesy of my parents. I took the pictures without the feet in them while I was in Toledo. They were too small for my feet so I begged my mom to take pictures of her feet in the socks. Those pictures are never attractive for the person she said. It shows the stitch definition I said. Why don’t you just take a picture without my feet she said. I already did I said.

I kept buggin’, and voila. I also managed to get some pictures of the Hedera socks I made her for her birthday last December. They were made of a suri alpaca and silk blend, since I thought she was allergic to wool. Harrumph. See if she gets fancy yarn socks ever again.

These socks are from Cookie, who makes clever little patterns. These socks ended up fairly tight, too, but mom says they’re comfy. The cuff was so tight I took it out and improvised a cuff.

It’s not great, and it doesn’t match up with the pattern below, but it was much more stretchy.

Regardless, I know that my mom’s feet are cozy and happy and wearing the two most complicated socks I’ve ever knit. Lucky girl.

ravelry > antsy
patiently awaiting your invite?
If you’ve added your name to the invite request list on our front page then you can use this form to check your place in line.
Email address look me up!
Found you!
You signed up on August 2, 2007
You are #22628 on the list.
12018 people are ahead of you in line. 6743 people are behind you in line.
35% of the list has been invited so far