19 Day Victory

Hey Flan,





Sorry it's been awhile since I posted, but I really wanted something exciting to talk about. As of yesterday afternoon, The Sampler Baby Blanket is FINISHED!! 19 Days after beginning (the second time) it is DONE! There was one person out there who openly questioned whether a baby blanket I began in January would be finished in 4 1/2 months and to you I say "HA!".





What to do when finished with one baby blanket? Start another of course. After hours and hours (and hours) on ravelry, I found this:

It's honestly called a "Princess Pram Cover". How could you not love something with that name?! There's a free pattern for it too. I pulled out the formerly rejected DB cotton angora and cast on. You make little squares triangularly starting with the stem and then put them all together. After finishing one I pulled out my handy dandy kitchen scale and weighed the square and the remaining part of the ball. As always, I'm concerned about running out of yarn. Instead of doing two big squares by three big squares I think I'm just going to do a 2x2 square, all finished with an edging from the Nicky Epstein book. I'm so smitten.

High on the completion of the 19 day blanket, I picked up my Kw/oT, a favorite sweater I would like to replicate and swatched my little heart out. I discovered that a US 3 and US4 are only 0.25mm different and no wonder I wasn't getting a different gauge. I love many things about the brilliance of the seamless sweater, but I really really like to do sweaters top down and am thus trying to reverse engineer directions for how to make that happen.

It made my brain hurt. A lot.

I even considered purchasing sweater designing software until I realized it's not in the budget and that people have been making sweaters for centuries without it and it can't really be that difficult. The main problem I'm finding is that none of the "ready made" sweater patterns are in a small enough gauge. Many hours of odd diagrams and scribbling later, I decided to go to bed and rest the brain- though I did put some books on hold at the library and I'm hoping those will give me a hand.

Hope your weekend is going well.

Surprise!

Kathleen-
So we've spent months plotting a baby shower for Aubree (technically due at the end of the month, but she's full term). And tonight was the night. Aubree knew we were doing a little thing, but not about the extra surprise we had in store.

In the past few months, 14 knitters knit sections of the Circle of Friends Blanket. At knit night, pieces would be slipped in my bag when her head was turned, or handed off surreptitiously in the coffee shop next door. This weekend, I seamed. And seamed. And wove in ends. And more ends.

The finished project was so worth it!



There were, of course, other knitted gifts. An adorable (matching!) hat.

An ruffly pink hat:
The Baby Surprise Jacket I knit earlier in the year:
An an adorable sewn sleeper gown.

So now the baby is properly outfitted, she can arrive!

Right Aubree?


Coming up in my next post: our Grand Canyon trip in pictures. And: New Knitting Priority List.

Made it to the Weekend

Hey Flan,

I hope things are going well. I was felled yesterday by a massive migraine followed by another massive migraine. Instead of calling it a migraine I chose to name it a "tension headache"- much different ring, don't you think? If you have a migraine you have to sleep it off, but if you have a tension headache you just do all your errands whilst trying to ignore the pain that is your head.

Friday's Accomplishments:
1. Picked up The Hubby's vehicle from the repair people. This means we each have cars to drive.
2. MAILED the FINISHED gifties to the people taking them to The Sister. I honestly did not think I was going to meet that deadline. Massive relief.
3. Had the tires on my car rotated. Fiercely ignored the tire people who wanted to do $135 of superfluous stuff to my car. Wanted to ask why on earth they were looking at the state of my windshield wipers and then JUDGING that state when all I asked them to do was to fiddle with the tires.
4. Made hugely significant progress on The Mommy's gifties.
5. Took a nap.

At this moment I am exceedingly happy I am no longer at work and am looking forward to a relaxed night of movies and knitting. Hope yours is equally nice.

Bedraggled

Hi Flan,
I hope you got to your Dad's in one piece and everything has gone well w/ Neurosurgery, Part 2. I tried calling but I think the power of the ICU blocked the call.

The Hubby was working on a geology lab late into the night. I was feeling like he needed moral support, so I stayed up and knitted while he mumbled incoherant things, presumably about rocks. The happy side is that there is a FO for the new year! I think this year has been all about starting things and the outlook for actually finishing something was incredibly bleak. I am now happy to report that, even though more than an hour was lost due to untangling a manufacturer's error, we have a finished object. I'm very happy. I am also very tired. Today will be done on a caffine high.

Have you been reading the Harlot about the meany who sends her emails of her blog entries corrected in red? I think that's just rude. Blogs are there for us to read and comment upon, but what kind of effrontery is it that someone would correct it and then send the corrected copy to the author? I find it inexcusable behavior. I'm not saying that I don't sometimes mentally correct other people's blogs while reading, but there is a line that you do not cross, and correcting someone else's work and then informing them of their errors is just not right.

Off to find the first caffine of the day.