Behind the Scenes

Wow--two weeks has gone by without a post!

What have I been doing? Well, first off--I've been knitting. If June and July were rather fallow knitting months for me, I am making up for it in August...

First off, this little beauty just fell off the needles:

This is Cosima, a Berroco design that I first saw featured in the fall or winter WEBS catalog (I forget which). I bought the yarn, Berroco Cuzco in this gorgeous chocolate brown, during the WEBS anniversary sale. It sat in my stashette for a few months while I worked on other projects, and then I finally decided to cast on for it.

Thank goodness for Ravelry, because without it I would never have been able to anticipate some of the issues? challenges? weirdnesses? of this pattern, and I ended up making many modifications to mine as I went through others' comments. The pattern as written yields a very wide sweater with a really deep scoop neck. Every single size (XS to XL) uses the same number of stitches around the neck (I want to say 162? In a bulky-weight yarn?) and the descriptor "Flashdance-esque" was used more than once. I decided to err on the side of caution and picked up only about half that number, and the sweater sits really nicely on my shoulders. It doesn't have quite the same dramatic scoop as I liked in the photo, but I'd rather have it be wearable. My job is so active (I rarely sit down during my teaching periods) that I just can't have anything non-functional in the wardrobe.

Listy list about Cosima:

• My favorite part of this pattern was the lace. There is something really fun about lace in a bulky yarn.
• This was my very first sweater knit in pieces and seamed! (Not counting the little seams in baby kimonos.)
• I stayed up FAR TOO LATE last Saturday (um...3:30 am) seaming, watching Buffy, weaving in ends...and it was totally worth it.
• I'm calling it Chocolatl because of the color.
• The fronts and back are size S (the 36") and the sleeves are M.
• I added about .5"-1" to the length because of my longwaistedness.
• A full-on Eucalan-enhanced wet blocking did wonders for it. I don't have a "real" blocking board or mats so I couldn't pin it out, but I used my rotary cutting mat to facilitate stretching the pieces by hand...and, again, the extra time was totally worth it.

So: what's next on the needles? Well, take a gander at these:

What are they? Well, if you've gone through the recent Twist Collective you may recognize this baby. She deserves a whole post of her own....and with any luck, it won't take me 2 weeks to write it.

And I bought Jared Flood's Classic Elite booklet, Made in Brooklyn...and I still have Norah Gaughan 3...and it's M's turn for a sweater...

And school starts in two weeks.

It warms my heart...

It warms my heart...

to see this stack of books on my six-year-old's bedside table.

The top four he's reading on his own...

The bottom two are our "together" books. (HP is still beyond him, but he's trying.)

I love that guy.

Tubular Tropicals

These warshrags are so, like, totally awesome.

It's funny how one project can lead you down the rabbit hole to three more in quick succession. Last week I sorted through a bunch of bins of craft supplies and fabric, which also happened to contain one unfinished ballband warshrag (top left). Part of my goal was to sort all UFOs (unfinished objects) into one bin to be worked on by the end of the summer (notice I didn't say finished by the end of the summer), and, amazingly, I was able to do that (OK, mostly; some knitting stuff is in its own basket).

I have a vague memory of starting the first one. It must have been on a car trip or where I was somewhere stashless, like the doctor's office, because I ran out of black after two and a half repeats and then, inexplicably just continued the pattern using just the ombre yarn for the next three or four repeats. This looks pretty cool, but it's hard to see the slip stitches because they blend in with the bricks too much and the whole point of this pattern is that I don't have to think about it. So once I picked it back up, I decided to go for the all-out freak show and finish with the bright lime green as the background color.

I am kind of weird and obsessive about this pattern, which I have made at least 20 times, probably more--I haven't taken photos of all of them and most have gone to other people as gifts. It's one of the first patterns I made after I started knitting again in 2006 and it still makes me feel so satisfied and smart when I finish.

Hence the fact that, even though I have my log cabin blanket still in progress, and even though I had only one chart left on Ishbel, I dropped everything for three or four days and knitted three more warshrags.

#2, top right, I started right away in the lime green/pink ombre combo that finished number one. When I ran out of pink, I picked up some teal to finish off the last two rows. (Teal is real, remember?)

For #3, I decided to move on to the cool color family, and do lime green with the bright and cheery "Pool" colorway for the blocks. There's one block row of solid teal just to finish off that ball.

And, since I liked #3 so well, I reversed the colors when I started #4. Didn't like that as much, because "Pool," well, pooled in the stockinette background, or mortar, sections. So, I went full out on the train to crazytown and REVERSED the colors midway through the cloth, reverting to "Pool" bricks and green mortar.

I don't know why this project tickled me so much...probably because it was 1) fast, 2) low-pressure, 3) creative, and 4) inexpensive.

I heart Ysolde

Ishbel, unblocked.

This is my July "garment." I started this one on the car ride down to Olympia at the beginning of the month, and now it's bound off just in time for the end of the month.

Blocked photos plus all specs to come!

Dog Days

I'm not sure exactly when the dog days are supposed to be, but we have hit them. It is muggy and sweltering and humid (did I mention muggy?), which may sound redundant but isn't in this case--it's muggy x3.

For a region that receives as much rain as we do, we're not really used to high humidity plus high heat (we usually get one or the other) and we PNDub-ers just can't handle it. We wilt and fuss

We spent the morning at the Children's Museum in Everett, which was a hoot and a half. It's a really well done museum--very hands-on, lots to do, clever and fun--and well worth the hour's drive to get there.

It is a great afternoon to hole up in the downstairs (which is nice and cool), put on an episode of Buffy (I'm re-watching season 2), and sew and knit to my heart's content.

Here's what I've been knitting, with near obsession:

Ballband Warshcloths.

These two are for my cousin's birthday on the ninth...I have three or four more that seem to have spontaneously generated themselves from my stash of Sugar 'n' Cream, because I certainly don't remember knitting them. I'm calling that set "Tubular Tropical" because they are these crazy '80's colors. Once I get the latest one off the needles, I'll show you the set.

IK Fall preview is up

The Fall IK preview is up and...wow.

I am a whore for cables.

Roxanne, turn that red light back on.

two baby shower ideas

And no, I'm not hinting at anything. In fact, I seem to be going to baby showers less and less these days as my college friends age. (Waaah.)

But: for the next one, I'm going with this and this.

I promise photos of knitting (miles of colorful garter stitch!), bedroom redux (Bungalow Gold!), and some reorganizing...

And, if anyone wants to buy a 1992 Kenmore sewing machine, see my ad here...