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.

Christmas Spirit

You know what gives me the Christmas spirit? Finshed objects! That's what! Like these socks:

Yep! The Red Herring socks are done! Although they're actually aqua, but whatever.

Yarn - Dale of Norway Baby Ull (100% wool, 180 yards), 1 skein in black, 2 skeins in blue (color 6714). It's really soft an springy, and it's superwash, which is an added bonus. My only complaint is that I kept snagging my needles on it and separating the plies.
Needles - size 2 32" addi turbos, for the magic loop-in'
Pattern - Red Herring from Knitty. I followed the pattern pretty closely, but because I have bizarrely long, narrow feet, I added a few more decreases to the foot to make it more snug.

Guess what? More finished objects:

Leila's Brainwash bag is complete! All that was left was to add straps, line it, and add a closure. By the way, that's my boyfriend modelling the bag, not my sister.
Yarn - 1 skein each of Lopi (100% wool, 110 yards) in black and white. I like this yarn to make random bulky things like bags and it's good for felting. It's too rough to make wearable things, though, and it sheds all over creation like a cat. So, I shaved the bag to try to get rid of all the wispies. Which felt really weird when I was doing it.
Needles - 24" size 11 bamboo circulars
Pattern - I used the charts from the Brainwash Bag pattern, but I adapted it to be worked in the round. I didn't felt it, either. I was planning to, but then I got scared of some horrible felting-gone-wrong fiasco messing up the communal washers in my apartment building and chickened out. The final dimensions are 14" long x 10" wide instead of 10" x 10".


Last but not least, I've been working on some swatches the last couple of days. My other, Tamar, started a leftovers blanket last year that's been in my possesion forever, and I haven't added to it yet. And I'd feel like a total jerk if I didn't do anything to it before I see her next week, so I made a bunch of swatches. Hopefully, I'll start swatching for real and I can just start adding those.






So, tomorrow morning I head back to Texas to celebrate Christmas with my family. Which will be nice because I don't see them that often, what with my living in Michigan. I'm going to start a new pair of socks (maybe these cable twist ones) on my flight tomorrow using this sport weight handspun I've had lying around for awhile. After Christmas, I'm flying to New York to visit my friends Dani (who got the purple armwarmers), Tamar, and Carly. And then back to the grind.



A word of warning, though: my family only has dial-up so I may not be able to post until I get back.

The dust has settled

Hallelujah! Finals are over, and even though I have to do pilot testing and data coding over Christmas break, I don't have any tests, or papers, or classes to go to until January! I have survived my first semester at grad school. Cheers to me.

So, how much knitting have I gotten done? Not too terribly much. I'm about halfway done with the second of the Red Herring socks, which is exciting. I really love this pattern, though as you can see in the photo, I did occasionally butcher the stranded pattern. But, it doesn't bother me enought to take it out, so I guess that's cool. I've noticed that I'm actually kind of a half-assed knitter when it comes to myself, and can deal with messed up stitches and decreases that aren't mirrored. But knitting for other people makes me a perfectionist. Weird, huh?






I also started designing a sweater for myself. Here's the sketchy schematic-y thing of it. I'm envisioning it as a kicky little bolero/cocoon shrug thing, all cozy and warm and fitted with a little shawl collar. I'm pretty excited about it.

I'm using Malabrigo yarn in Bobby Blue, which is really gorgeous. My Other bought it for me in New York months and months ago and I haven't been able to think of the right thing to do with it until now. I'm working it in a really basic twisted stitch pattern based on braided cables. If you look closely at the picture underneath the sketch, you can kind of see the wee little twisty braids. I like the texture, but it eats yarn like nobody's business.


The last picture shows you how far along I am. I'm attempting to knit it all in one peice because I hate seaming, so I'm using the raglan decreases from the top-down all-in-the-round sweater pattern here. But, I am knitting it flat since it's supposed to flare open in the front. I figured it was either knit it flat and shape it as I go (sensible), or knit it in the round and steek the bejesus out of it to beat it into the right shape (totally, utterly foolish). Anyway, I'm just past the armholes, so there's not much to show just yet.

And I have completely finished Sam's bag! I've washed all three bags and blocked them, but hers was the first to dry out, so it was the first to get lined and strapped and the like. Isn't it pretty? The final measurements are 10" wide x 12" long x 1" deep. I made it in the round and used the slip-stitch pattern from Via Diagonale. I made the flap by continuing the slip-stitch pattern for half the stitches flat. Today I sewed on the strap (a 1" wide, 6 ' long peice of black cotton twill), lined it with about 1/2 yard of pink cotton, and sewed on a big button to close it. I braided three strands of Lopi and sewed it to the inside of the flap to make a button loop. You know what I like best about it? The way the color shifts on the flap and the bag match up perfectly.
Yarn - 1 skein Noro Big Kuryeon (100% wool, 176 yards) in colorway 18 (purple/navy) and 1 skein Lopi (100% wool, 110 yards) in black. I ended up with about 1/2 a skein of each left.
Needles - size 11 bamboo circulars
Pattern - I used a simple common-sense bag pattern in the Via Diagonale slip-stitch pattern: knit in the round until your work is an inch or so longer than what you want the finished bag to be, turn it inside out and work a three-needle bind off, and make a gusset (described beautifully here). I prefer to sew straps on rather than knit them, especially if the bag isn't going to be felted, since knitted fabric stretches so much, and I definetly advise lining bags. It makes them prettier, and more durable. And if it's a colorwork bag like this one, you won't be catching your keys on the floats every six seconds. Pretty damn simple.

Update

The end of the semester pressure-cooker is turned all the way up, so there's little time for knitting and even less for blogging. Nonetheless, I valiantly march onward. Here I am finishing up the Point Five scarf instead of submitting an IRB... proving procrastination can be productive after all. It is all done and wearable, and I'll post final pictures and details about it after the finals dust has cleared.



In the meantime, I've started a pair of Red Herring socks from the last issue of Knitty in turquoise and black. I knit about 1/2 inch or so whenever I need a break from my more pressing academic pursuits. I'm finding that although I do it very, very slowly, stranded colorwork can be really satisfying. Still hate intarsia though.