So, about those music videos...

...They were for Jon. More specifically, I posted them so that we would be able to rock out Friday night in celebration of it being his last day of work. See, what happened is that Jon's been temping lately (working on this book-scanning project for Google. It's apparently super-secret....and I may have already said too much), and he worked from 4pm-midnight. This was fine for now, but during the semester, he'll have afternoon classes and wouldn't be able to stay on. Classes start in a couple of weeks, so he decided to quit in order to give himself time to get prepared to start classes and find a job that's more compatible with his student schedule. He wanted me to make sure that everyone knows that he's not slacking off, and the he's at a job interview as I write this! He has several more scheduled for the week.

Anyway, I thought he'd earned a break so I threw him a surprise quitting party Friday night, and the music videos were part of it. I should clarify that said party was attended only by me, Jon, and the cats. It was selective.


So, these were the decorations. I printed out a bunch of words and phrases associated with being jobless and taped them around the apartment (Jon's favorite was "The Best Stand Down"). Originally, they were going to be suspended from the ceiling, but I'm short and that didn't work out. We had a good time.

To keep with the theme here, I have a couple more bits of Jon-centric news. In knitting news, I'm making him a sweater!


As you can see, it's not just any sweater....it's a full-out slouchy old man sweater. It's gone super-quick because i'm using bulky yarn and size 13 needles. I originally bought the yarn to make the spicy fitted V neck top from Fitted Knits. I ended up making the entire body of the sweater in, like, 3 days, and realized that something wasn't quite right. We've all been there, right? Awesome pattern, nice yarn, but the garment just isn't working. I set it aside for a couple of days and realized I'd never wear the damn thing because I look terrible in gray. I still don't know what possessed me to by it in that color. So I ripped it.

Jon liked the yarn, so I offered to make something for him out of it. Thus, the grandpa cardigan was born. About all I have to do for it now is make some big patch pockets, sew on some buttons, and weave in the ends. And it could stand a good blocking.

In non-kitting Jon-related news, he's got a blog now, too! Well, more specifcally, it's a blog where he's serializing his fantasy novel. He wrote the prologue as a project during college when he was too young to know better. Then, a couple of years later, a bunch of us were hanging out talking about what bad writers we were when we first got to college and Jon showed it to us. We had a good laugh, and then got weirdly obsessessed with it. Seriously, for the last 3 or so years, a group of about 4 or 5 of us have outlined the novel (and sequels, since all good fantasy books come in trilogies.), held dramatic readings complete with funny voices, and had heated discussions about such things as the philological inconsistency of character's names.

Jarthen, a most brave lad

If you're interested, pop on over and check it out! There's a couple of character bios up already and a magnificantly detailed map of the fictional country it's set in. I'm still tweaking the layout, so it's subject to change, but the story's already being posted.

I'll give you behind-the-scenes infor regarding Jarthen and co. And if you do check it out, leave the big guy a comment, will you? He's an absolute sucker for flattery or attention in general.

totally unrelated to knitting...

...I'll explain tomorrow, promise. In the meantime, enjoy some of my favorite music videos!

1. Eels - last stop:this town


2. Blur - Coffee and TV


3. the killers - bones


4. Jamiroquai - virtual insanity


5. gorrillaz - 19/2000

Bundles of Love

Guess what I got in the mail? A package from my sockpal! I confess that there might have been some giggling and jumping up and down when it arrived. So...here's what I got:


Socks (obviously), which I'll get to in a minute, a flower pin, and grape licorice from a winery. How cool is that? It's actually really tasty, like twizzlers, but less plastic-y and more fruity.


About the socks...they are awesome. They fit perfectly (which I'm really excited about because I'm still learning how to make mine the right size, much less a total stranger) and are lovely. I'm not sure what the pattern is, but it's kind of like a lacier version of the Monkey pattern. I really love the yarn. I'm not sure what it is, but it goes from gray to a bright pinkish-red, to black and back again. But my favorite thing about them? The picot edge.

So, basically, mad props to my (get from) sockpal! You know, in all the hurry to make/finish/send off socks to my (give to) sockpal, I kind of forgot that the whole thing was reciprocal. Literally, I forgot I was going to get a package until it showed up. And the main reason I signed up for sockapalooza was to get socks!

Anyway, that's most likely going to be the highlight of my week. Mittens got a bundle of love of her own:


Awhile back, I bought sock yarn for my friend Van, and in the process of rolling it, half of it was turned into smallish balls (as is right and proper) and the other half was turned into a huge, messy knot. After three of us tried to unravel it, I deemed it a knot of Gordian proportions and abandoned it. And then Mittens claimed it as her throne. So she's having a good week too.

In actual knitting news, I've been working on Rusted Root for awhile and I'm making good progress. I bought the pattern and yarn in a kit from kpixie because I was bored. It's really simple, so I've been using it as my in-between project for when I just want to veg out and knit while I'm watching America's Next Top Model marathons. Which are on all the time. Which may be why the Root is already to the waist decreases.


So far I have kind of a love-hate relationship with it. The yarn is Karabella zodiac, which is a mercerized cotton. I've never worked with it before and while I really like the color and sheen it has, I would have preferred the fluffyness of regular cotton. I think something about the firmness and the shine of the yarn made it look really weird in the lace stitch written in the pattern, so once again, I replaced it with a cable panel. Or maybe I just suck at lace knitting.

(On a side note, this picture of the cable was originally grass green! I had to spend a solid five minutes messing with the tone and saturation and the like to get it anywhere close to the actually color. Why do cameras do that? It's maddening.)

The other thing is that I love that the pattern is basically a cute, puffed-sleeve t-shirt, but I the specter of a baggy Root drooping under the weight of the aformentioned yarn that was haunting me. So I decided to throw in some heavy-duty shaping and rely on the Negative Ease Gods to keep it from stretching out into wonkiness. While this is great for me, it does make me kinda hate having even bought the pattern since I've now reworked, like, 89% of it. It's cool though.

And now, I'll bid you adieu so that I can keep working on my now very shapley Rusted Root and watch the first part of ANTM Cycle 5. I've seen the rest of this season, but not these first few episodes, and I must rectify that.

FO: Orangina

Presenting Orangina:

(Click for bigger)

This is the last surprise FO for awhile, I promise. Remember when I said in my last post I hadn't blogged awhile because of some major facepalm moments? And that one of them entailed a major gauge error? Well, that would be the summertime tunic.

I kind of fudged the gauge swatch and never realized it because of the way it was bunched on the circular needle. I worked on it at the beach, at the movies, while reading the last Harry Potter book, and then I checked it. It was about 10 inches long and I was all "hmmm, I wonder if it's time to start the armholes," so I put it on scrap yarn. And then I was like, "my hours of long, tedious work have created a gigantic, shapeless sack....DAMN YOU, GAUGE! DAMN YOU AND YOUR SICK, TWISTED SENSE OF VENGEANCE!"

It was literally 10 inches long by about 48 inches wide. And I admit I am a bit busty, bit I'm no Dolly Parton. So after carefuly measuring gauge as if I had just made the world's biggest gauge swatch on purpose, I ripped it all out and sat on the yarn for a few days, humbled by the defeat. I also came to the conclusion that the summertime tunic would probably look terrible on me anyway, and make me look more frumpy than carefree. I'd bought the orangina pattern awhile ago and decided to use the yarn for that instead.

Yarn - 5 skeins of Knitpicks shine (60% pima cotton, 40% modal, 110 yards), sport weight, in cherry. This yarn is awesome! It's really soft, and (perhaps not shockingly) shiny, and totally worth getting since it's super-cheap. The downside is that I have 4 skeins of this yarn leftover, and I'm not really feeling making another tank top out of the same exact yarn.
Needles - 29" size 6 Inox circular, which gave me a gauge of 20 sts x 28 rows = 4 in stockinette.
Pattern - Orangina by Glampyre. I'm apparently working through her entire catalog. The gauge I got was significantly looser than what was listed in the pattern so I calculated the number of stitches needed to fit my bust size (200ish) and made the size that came closest to that number (XS, with 206 sts). Here are my other mods:

• I worked it bottom-up, not top-down as written. I did this mostly to start in the round and to get the ribbing out of the way. I also wanted to eliminate seaming and be able to kitchener the shoulders together.
• I made the ribbing 5" long and the lace section 16" long, which is longer than specified for the XS size.
• I have tiny, wee little shoulders. They also slope down kind of dramatically. This means that I have issues with bra straps falling down, the straps of shirts and dresses being to long, and that I get a weird wing effect with square cut tops that have no armhole shaping (like this one). When it came time to separate the front and back to make armholes, I bound off 5 sts and then alternated knitting 1 row plain and decreasing 1 sts on the edges until a total of 9 sts were decreased on both sides. I basically eliminated and entire lace repeat this way.
• I grafted 3" of the shoulders together instead of 2".