Part 1

Ok. So I got absolutely no sleep last night. None. Nada. It was bizarre, and as I enter my 37th straight hour of wakefulness, I've decided to breakdown the next few posts into three sections so I don't have to think so hard and be clever. Section 1 are random facts about me (which will eventually be compiled into tidy little lists like here and here). Section 2 will be knitterly happenings and acquisitions of note. Section 3 will be the best thing that happened to me that day....or, more accurately, the best thing to have happened to me while my camera was within reach.

Bear with me, just until my circadian rhythm regains its equilibrium. It's delicate and startles easily.

Things About Me (1-25)
1. I worked at the Texas Renaissance Festival since I was a teeny-tiny thing. I started as a mascot for the belly dancers and worked my way up to a contracted gig where I would do full-body slides in front of strangers to “practice my groveling should the King appear.”

me at age 3 workin' hard for the money

2. I played the French Horn from the 6th to the 12th grade. I was first chair of my section every year from the 8th grade on. I still remember all the fingerings and would like to play it again.

3. I had the dorkiest letter jacket in high school EVER. Seriously. I had letters for marching band, the literary criticism team, National Honor Society, creative math and science team, academic decathalon, and my nickname was Clogar (which is, of course, a math term).

4. I have admitted that I am painfully addicted to reality TV. What you do not know is that I relapsed. I watched reality TV avidly in high school, but stopped during college, and promptly got addicted again once I moved to Ann Arbor and got cable. I can still name almost all of the contestants from the first season of Survivor.

5. I am a terrible cook. Strangely, I am really good at spicing food.

6. I am absolutely fearless when it comes to strange foods, but I have weird issues with drinking milk and eating eggs. It grosses me out, even though it didn’t when I was a kid.

7. I weigh my two cats almost everyday by picking them up, weighing myself, dropping them, weighing myself again and subtracting the two. I find it endlessly amusing.

8. I have horrendous sinus issues. My nose is constantly stuffy and for the last five years, I have tended to pop Benedryl like candy. This makes me virtually immune to its sedative side effects.

9. I can comfortably give a piggy back ride to Jon, who weighs roughly 90 pounds more than me. You have to see it to believe it.

10. I was very skinny before I hit puberty and had a most unfortunate mushroom-ish haircut. I was often confused for a little Mexican boy.

11. I love my hands and feet. They are long and thin and graceful, like my father’s.

12. My sister and I have very similar voices, and people sometimes have problems telling us apart on the phone. The trick is to remember that she curses more.

13. I can’t lose my Texas accent. It’s especially evident with the words hill, fire, and oil. I thought the ‘h’ in words like human or Houston was silent until I went to college.

14. I do almost all of my work on the coffee table sitting on the floor. I stack my papers underneath the coffee table and I’ve spread a sleeping bag out in the space between the coffee table and the couch. Jon and I call this “The Nest.”

15. I am not that attached to my books, but I am attached to my DVDs. I hoard them, protect them, and I’m very picky about the cases, whereas I tend to haphazardly break the spines of books and give them away for no reason.

16. I hate backpacks and purses and carry only messenger type bags.

17. I hated wearing socks until I started knitting them.

18. During college, I gained about 25 pounds, but I didn’t change clothing sizes. My friends speculate that I must have swallowed a piece of dark matter at some point.

19. I have my nose pierced but not my ears.

20. I have dyed my hair pink, red, purple, blue, and green.


21. I am an amateur haircuttress, and I seem to have a weird knack for it. I have a regular clientèle of five people now.

22. I once ate an entire lemon tart (that served 4 people) by myself and gave myself a blinding sugar migraine.

23. People think Dani and I are sisters when we’re together. When we were housemates in Oberlin, people thought we were the same person because we shared clothes.


24. When something wakes me up in the middle of the night, my immediate response is to punch Jon until he wakes up and deals with the problem. Then I steal the covers and go back to sleep.

25. My mother taught me to leave a bit of food on my plate at meals for the “Manners Fairy” when I was growing up. Jon is from the clean plate club and finds this odd, but now depends on me having leftovers so he can finish my food for me. It’s symbiotic.

Knitterly Happenings and Acquisitions
So.....because I've been a mite silly the last couple of hours (you know, thanks to the lack of sleep) I made Jon drive me to the yarn store. I'd promised my sister, who's had a bit of a rough week, that I'd send her a knitting package this week. I'm giving her my Red Herring socks (I inadvertantly made them a bit too wide for my feet, but just perfect for hers), a couple of skeins of yarn, and a set of new needles. So the visit to the store was totally appropriate...but buying 19 skeins of tweed yarn was not.

The purple is Balance cotton/merino in amethyst which I hope to turn into a tweedy vest. The gray, which was 50% off (!!) is..........this yarn. Ah, Harris Tweed, we meet again.

Best Moment of the Day

Warm brownie fresh from the oven with a scoop of coffee ice cream on top. So tasty.

FO: Squiggle Hat!

It's been a long week, full of terrible group projects and much whining about said terrible group projects. It's ok, though, because I finished my hat!

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This hat was just what I needed this week. It was quick and fun to knit, and I felt a hefty sense of accomplishment after I finished it. I had two group projects going this week, and both groups had one of those super-ambitious high-strung types in BOTH of my groups (I, contrary to popular belief, am not particularly ambitious or high strung). In both groups, said high-strung person took over and got all crazy, resulting in group in-fighting the likes of which I haven't seen since junior high. For serious, guys, one of them literally highjacked our group paper and emailed the rest of the group the night before it was due saying that she had done more than her fair share of the work. So I emailed back offering to finish writing/pasting the paper together.....so she dropped out of conflict for several hours. I ended up on the phone with Jon (who was delivering tasty pizzas) ranting about how ridiculous and immature said group member was and pacing back and forth in the apartment. Anyway, after all was said ad done, I'd fume and knit a few rows on this hat and feel better.
Yarn - EA Yarns Andes (100% wool, 165 yards) in color 19 (orange/blue). I wasn't sure how hat-friendly this yarn was at first, but it actually ended up being pretty soft and surprisingly not scratchy. And I still love the colors.
Needles - 16" el cheapo bamboo size 7 circulars and a set of 4 bamboo size 7 dpns for the crown decreases
Pattern - my own! A skeletal pseudo-pattern follows below:

Squiggle Hat

Band
- CO 90 sts and work in [p1, k1, p1] to end for 3 rounds
- round 4: work all knit stitches as LEFT TWIST
- round 5: work all stitches in pattern
- repeat these two rounds once more
- round 8: work all knit stitches as RIGHT TWIST
- round 9: work all stitches in pattern
- repeat these two rounds 3x
- repeat rounds 4 & 5 two times
- work 3 rounds of [p1, k1, p1] to end

Slouchification
round 1: [k9, m1] to end {10 ts increased}
round 2: k plain
round 3: [k10,m1] to end {10 sts increased}
round 4: k plain
round 5: [k11, m1] to end {10 sts increased}

knit plain until hat masures 7"

Crown Decreases
r 1: [k13, k2tog] to end {112 sts}
r2: [k12, k2tog] to end {104 sts}
r3: [k11, k2tog] to end {96 sts}
r4: [k10, k2tog] to end {88 sts}
r5: [k9, k2tog] to end {80 sts}
r6: [k8, k2tog] to end {72 sts}
r7: [k7, k2tog] to end {64 sts}
r8: [k6, k2tog] to end {56 sts}
r9: [k5, k2tog] to end {48 sts}
r10: [k4, k2tog] to end {40 sts}
r11: [k3, k2tog] to end {32 sts}
r12: [k2, k2tg] to end {24 sts}
r13: [k1, k2tog] to end {16 sts}
r14: [k2tog] to end {8 sts}

weave yarn through and pull tight


And that's all there was to it.

PS - Jon wants me to tell you that there are SUBLIMINAL MESSAGES on Sprite cans! Yeah, I don't know where he's going with that, either

Now, I know this isn't knitting-related

...but when did they start letting the undead on reality TV?



More knitting stuff when I'm not too busy to enjoy anything other than reality TV.

A Weekend at Van's

Guess where we were for the last couple of days? Van's in Chicago! He was having a recital (using a natural French horn, no less!), and we dropped by for a couple of days because Chicago's only a four hour drive away. And when you come from someplace like Texas, four hours isn't that far at all. Besides, since the recital was regarded as "an occasion," an astounding amount of food was prepared. It was like Thanksgiving all over again. We couldn't afford not to go!

It was wonderfully refreshing. You know those days were you finally stop and take a break and you had no idea that you needed a break that bad? That was what happened to me. Apparently the last week was far more exhausting than I thought. I recuperated by eating roughly a pound of cashew cookies and watching the first and third seasons of Little Britain. Which is one of the most awesome shows ever.

Oh yeah. And I did some knitting.


I started these socks last week. I didn't work on them that much, but I needed something to work on other than Flair. I'm using the red Ultramerino I bought awhile back and the drop stitch pattern from this steering wheel cover from Knitty...which is why I have dubbed them the Wheelie Socks. I've just started the toe decreases for the first one, so they're going pretty fast.

But then, because I'm a strange one, I decided halfway through the first season of Little Britain that I needed a break from the size 0 (!) needles I was making the socks on. So I started another project:


Now, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "Who in their right mind would not bring the sweater she's been working on so feverishly, but instead bring a project that requires wee little needles? And who would be mad enough to then bring back up supplies should she finish/get bored with said wee needles she subjected herself to in the first place?" Well, I would. Because that's the way I roll.

Anyway, I've had an idea for a hat pattern bouncing around in my brain for awhile now. I wanted a slouchy hat that would be warm enough to wear in the cold winter winds (I made myself one awhile back, but it's lacy and the wind whips right through it), but would be big enough to accommodate my hair in it's puffy, thick, grown-out state (Shedir is warm, but not accommodating). So far, I've made the band. The serpentine twisted stitches that wiggle back and forth are there just to add that extra awesomeness that makes knitting mundane items by hand worthwhile, and I've decided to call it the Squiggle Hat because of them. Now I have to figure out how many stitches to increase in order reach the right amount of slouchiness without verging into mushroom territory - which is a fine line. Wish me luck.

PS - I just bought the sixth season of Northern Exposure. My collection is complete! All is right with the world.

Oh man.

What a horribly hectic week. Nothing really major happened classwise - I had a particularly tedious group project to do and some heavier than usual reading. It was pretty light research-wise too. So what was so bad? Probably some combination of a continued lack of sleep and the psychology graduate program recruitment weekend. I'll start at the beginning.

Monday went pretty well until I got another migraine. I spent the afternoon and a lot of the evening on the bathroom floor because it's the only room in our apartment without windows, and therefore the darkest and most migraine-friendly. Once I started feeling a bit better, I had to finish a problem set for stats, which meant I got to sleep far later than I was planning to. Oh well. Tuesday went well enough, except that I agreed to host a student for recruitment weekend (my research assistant on my honors project! Oberlin represent!), so I spent much of the day trying to clean up. During my questionnaire design class, I got really bored and scribbled some cable designs for a pair of socks I'm planning. Here's said charts all knitted into swatches:

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I want to do a cable on the side of the sock that splits at the gusset, and half runs down the foot and half runs down the heel. See the little wedge of stockinette at the bottom? Those would be the half cables running next to it. And I really wanted a cable design that had six strands to it so the half-cables would be braids or braid-like and not just rope cables. Which one do you like? I'm leaning towards the first, I think, but I like the sharpness of the diamond in the second one too. Leave me a comment with your vote! And I'll draw the name of someone who voted for the winner and name the socks after you. How exciting.

Wednesday, I was in Oberlin! Yay! I gave a leadoff for the socialist group there for International Women's Day. Well, women's day was actually Thursday, but that's when the student I was hosting for recruitment weekend was supposed to come in, so we held it a day early. While I was there, I visited my favorite professors, wen to taco night at Dascomb....and the local yarn shop. Where I spent entirely too much money last year because it was on the walk home from campus.

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The skein underneath the dinosaur is Andes by EA yarns in color 19 (blue/orange). Now, I'm generally not a fan of complimentary color combinations, but I've been loving me some orange and blue. Still not down with red and green or yellow and purple, though. I'm planning a slouchy cap...perhaps with wee cables? We all know I'm a fan of wee cables. The yarn with the wee people dolls (Texas Renaissance Festival, represent!) on the right is a skein of Noro Transitions in gold/blue/purple. I have been dying to knit with this stuff since I first heard about it. It was on sale, so I let Jon pick a color and have promised him a hat with it. Speaking of Jon, though he has a well-documented disinterest in the art of knitting, he loves him some yarn. He's taken to rolling unwound skeins into balls, and has developed a distinct yarn palate (if you will), with a taste for thicker, high quality yarn and a particular weakness for variegated colors. He's also taken to posing unwound skeins around our apartment for mini-photoshoots, so expect to see more pictures like those above in the future.

So, on Thursday, we scrambled around the apartment trying to make it guest-ready. We cleaned up and put stuff away, blew up the air mattress, jon even mopped the kitchen! All the movment startled the cats, and they ran for cover.


The rest of recruitment weekend went well. And I finally finished said tedious group project. hopefully life is all settled and ironed out now that I'm past the post-Spring Break adjustment period and I can start churning out some FO's again. Speaking of which, the body of Flair is done and about half of one sleeve! Stay tuned for more.

The end of spring break...

...but just the beginning of procrastination. I have a bunch of stuff I should really do tonight before re-entering society tomorrow: research for a socialist article, research for a project I'm working on, a problem set for stats, laundry, shower, etc. Instead, I've watched TV and been knitting.

Well, I did have a migraine earlier, and the recovery from one of those suckers can be quite long.

Of course, I did get it because I freaked myself out about having to go back to work (and normal life) tomorrow. So, maybe it's not really an excuse after all.

In any case, I just wanted to sum up my spring break with this:

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All my swatches knitted in the last week. This is really impressive given that I really never swatch, ever. They are, from top left to bottom right, the stockinette swatch for Flair (Knitpicks swish on US 7's), a lace swatch for a sweater I'm designing (2 strands of Karabella lace mohair held together on US 4's), the stockinette swatch for Jon's sweater (Knitpicks swish on US 9's), a swatch of the cable motif for Jon's sweater (Knitpicks swish on US 9's), and a lace swatch for Orangina (Alpaca with a Twist Fino on US 3's).

Ok. Back to the grindstone and the real world.

Wee Braids Bolero - Complete!

Presenting for the first time.....the Wee Braids Bolero!

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The yarn and needles I ordered earlier this week came in yesterday, and faster than you could say 'SPRING BREAK!!!,' the bolero was done. Seriously, I know that all I had left to do was the ribbing and the collar, but I definitely thought it was going to take longer than it did. I think one reason it got done so fast was that Jon rolled the skeins of yarn into balls for me. He loves doing it, and claims it has a calming effect on him. I hate it, and readily admit that if I had to wind the yarn myself, this bolero would not even have been touched again for a couple of weeks. So, many thanks and much credit to Jon for making this overnight completion possible.

I really like the way it turned out. It's warm and snuggly without being too heavy, and I think it's going to look just as nice when worn with jeans s it does with that dress. It didn't come out quite as I'd planned, but I like it anyway. I'm actually impressed that it turned out as well as it did considering, I just kind of winged it. I sketched it, took a couple of measurements, and then just started knitting it without writing out even a skeletal pattern. I also like that there was enough natural sunlight today to have the bolero's debut photo shoot without the flash on. Considering the constant bleak cloud cover we've been suffering round these part, this was quite the lucky break.

Now for the gory knitting details:


Here's the obligatory laid-out-on-the-floor shot. Kindly ignore the weirdness on the carpet.

Now, the collar is what I'm proudest of. I'd originally envisioned it as a shawl collar where the ribbing folds up and over (like this), but after blocking it, I noticed that the back of the neckline was really low, much lower than I'd anticipated. Which is what I get for not writing out a pattern.

Anyway, I decided to use the ribbing to make the shoulders of the bolero and then continue the ribbing into a cute stand-uppish collar that frames the throat just so. So, I worked a 10 or so looooong rounds of 1 x 1 ribbing, and made decreases along the raglan seam every other round Then, I made a buttonhole, stopped doing the raglan decreases, and worked a bunch of short rows to lengthen the collar without messing up then ribbing along the rest of the opening.

I feel weirdly empowered that I kind of pulled all of that out of my ass with no planning this morning. It makes me feel like I have some sort of sixth sense for knitting, and that I can go about merrily knitting awesome sweaters by instinct alone, untethered by earthly patterns. Which is just foolish, and asking for trouble.

Here's the last little detail I wanted to show you:


I got this button (from Ballostring designs) for free with an order from Kpixie awhile back. How awesome is that? Almost as awesome as it looks on the bolero.

Yarn - 5 skeins of Malabrigo worsted merino (100% merino wool, 215 yards) in Bobby blue. In actuality, it took 4 full skeins and maybe 1/4 of the fifth skein. I alternated skeins every two rows for the body and the ribbing/collar, but was lazy and just used one skein for the arms. I've used Malabrigo before, and found out the hard way that two skeins of the same color and dye lot do not match, and that you have to stripe them in order for the resulting garment to not look...well, striped. In any case, I absolutely love this yarn. It's incredibly soft, and the colors are beautiful. The one downside to it is that it pills like crazy and therefore doesn't show stitch work terribly well. But, whatever.
Needles - I worked the body on a 16" size 9 el cheapo bamboo circular, which was actually the first knitting needle I ever bought. I've made a bajillion hats on it, so the smooth coating has rubbed off, making the needle really grab on to the yarn. Knitting the body of this thing on that needle was a nasty business, full of frustration, little progress, and the occasional splinter. I switched to size 9 bamboo dpn's for the sleeves, which was markedly better. For the ribbing and collar, I used a 32" size 9 addi turbo (which I'd ordered for Jon's sweater), which made finishing the sweater a very quick and much more pleasant knitting experience.
Pattern - My own! I worked it all in once piece, using the top-down raglan technique, and knit it flat. The sweater is worked in an all-over slip-stitch braided stitch, and features 'purled' seams on either side. The cutaway front panels were shaped by increasing and decreasing along the outer edge. The ribbing around the opening was worked after the body had been completed. Stitches were picked up and knit in 1 x 1 ribbing, with short rows added to the collar portion. And that's all there was to it.

Jon's Birthday - Take 2 and other stuff

So, I planned on posting everyday this week, but I got lazy. To make up for it, here's a really, really long post. Enjoy.

Jon's Extended Birthday Shenanigans
As discussed in the last post, Jon's birthday got stretched over two days because of my inability to buy him presents ahead of time and wake up before noon. I'm happy to report that his presents came in! I got him a book and a computer game, Rise of Nations, and he's very happy with both. In fact, one of the reasons I haven't updated the blog is because he's been hogging my computer (which is faster than his) to play it.

I should have seen that coming, though. We have this game on my family computer in Texas, and Jon's been known to sneak off at random times to go play it in secret when he's down there. Seriously, one time we were watching a movie and Jon excused himself to go to the bathroom.....and never returned. After the movie was over (two hours later), I found him totally absorbed in some campaign against the Germans or something. Which he later lost.

Anyway, I did manage to take Jon out on a date. Tuesday night, after playing Rise of Nations for several hours, we went to go see Pan's Labyrinth. Which was fantastic and well worth seeing. Especially since the local movie theater only charges $2.50 for student tickets on Tuesday night. I don't know why I didn't know about this earlier.

In many ways, Jon's birthday has extended all the way to today. We're going to go see Amazing Grace tonight because it's got Horatio Hornblower in it, who Jon loves, and it's about the British, who Jon also loves. I also finished his socks, which makes them his last birthday present. I think he loves them too. Just full of love, that one.

_

Yarn - 3 skeins Artyarns Supermerino (100% merino wool, 104 yards) in color 119 plus some leftover Classic Elite Renaissance Heathered yarn (100% wool, 110 yards) in black truffle that I still had from making a hat for Jon's brother over a year ago. For the first sock, I ended up using 1 1/2 skeins of the supermerino by the time I needed to start the toe decreases, so I decided to play it safe and knit the toes in a different color. Turns out my instincts were right, because I only had about a yard and a half left of the last skein of the supermerino when I started the toe of the second sock.
Needles - size 3 addi turbos, worked using magic loop.
Pattern - Here There Be Dragon socks, upscaled version, just like these. I made a few modifications, though. I didn't do the fancy-schmancy toe and heel that the pattern calls for. I substituted the standard flap heel for durability and to give Jon more room in the instep. I knit the flap about 25% longer for him than I do for myself before turning it, which seems to have done the trick (see the pictures above for the freakishly long heel and gusset). I substituted a standard wedge toe because I had to use different yarn and thought it would look dumb to continue the pattern with contrasting yarn. Also, I figured Jon could use the extra durability considering his track record.

Other Knitterly Happenings
While Jon's been playing Rise of Nations, I've been surprisingly productive. In addition to finishing his socks, I finished knitting the second sleeve of the bolero I've been working on since forever.

_

Before picking up the stitches along the opening and starting the ribbing, I decided to block it to give me a sense of how long to make said ribbing. I pinned it out to let it dry and felt very productive and responsible. See the closeup above? That's what the braided slip-stitch pattern look like when it's blocked out. Nice huh?

I started the ribbing, but I've only got 3/4 of a skein left and I'm pretty sure that's not quite enough. The project's on hold briefly until the yarn and new needles (32" size 9 addi turbos) I ordered come in. The 16" bamboo circular is just not working for dealing with the hundreds of stitches that have to be worked in tedious 1 x 1 ribbing. Besides, I'll need them to make Jon's sweater, so I figured I should go ahead and get them sooner rather than later.

I also started Flair:


I'm about halfway done with the yoke. I'm basically following the pattern, but I decided to add a few cables because I can't seem to knit a pattern without altering some part of it. I wonder why that is.

I've been obsessed with this sweater since the pattern's been available, and worked on it with a hungry desperation all day yesterday. Usually I knit for the pleasure of knitting and my enjoyment of the resulting product is a fun bonus, like those toy prizes in cereal boxes. This time, I need that sweater. Here's hoping it lives up to my absurdly lofty expectations, right?

PS - Stay tuned! Jon's going to be authoring a guest post that you're not going to want to miss either today or tomorrow.