Kiss My Knits!

Check out what Turtlegirl76 got me! This is 360 yards of “Luxury” sock yarn from Creatively Dyed Yarn in colorway Saranac Lake. The fiber content is 80% Merino, 10% Cashmere, 10% Nylon.

I met Dianne, who owns Creatively Dyed, when Turtlegirl76 and I went on a road trip to Greer to visit her yarn shop. That was before she shut her doors to concentrate exclusively on dyeing. She kept her shop open past business hours to show us some spinning tricks. Dianne is crazy talented and extremely nice. She’s also the hardest working woman in the yarn biz.

Turtlegirl points out that Saranac Lake is very close to her hometown in New York, which no doubt drew her to this particular skein. Thanks, Turtlegirl! It fits my color sense perfectly and it’ll make a gorgeous pair of socks. What a great belated birthday present!

In other yarn news, the Koolhaas is about to be unraveled. Here we see one pattern repeat done. This was not a good yarn choice. While lofty and beautiful, it’s too unevenly spun for cables to really pop. It’s also striping, which isn’t the look I was hoping for.

Instead, I think this will get made into My So-Called Scarf which I’ve been wanting to try. We’ll see how that goes.

In Jayne hat news, I’m working on mid-March orders now, so that’s going well. Can’t Stop The Serenity venues are getting their requests in, which is good since the wait is creeping back up and is at the seven week mark now. I want everyone to be cunningly hatted at these events, so I’ll keep plugging away!

Is it my imagination, or are all of this person’s hats actually other peoples’ designs tweaked just a bit?

Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but if that’s what’s going on, I figure they should be politely informed that it’s Not Cool. To that end, I gave a heads-up to the designers, so they could make their own call.

Of course, I could be totally wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time.

I myself made the sock monkey hat last year, so that’s what hit my radar when I saw this post.

In other news, I’m working on hats from Feb 7th and later, so we’re currently on schedule with the Jaynes. Yay!

Back at last from the in-laws. A pleasant time, as always, but the last bit was loud and chaotic. In fact, it was chaotic enough that I apparently mis-knitted an entire row of Shedir and will have to rip back. I couldn’t do so in the car because by the time we got out of there, it was already dark.

I got a copy of Barbara Walker’s Treasury of Knitting Patterns from my mother-in-law, so I thought I’d try out some stitch patterns in the car, but it was too dark to even see the pages. Instead I decided to amuse myself by trying to knit a design out of yarn-overs strictly by touch. I’ll generously say that it needs work. Well, at least it was quiet in the car, so that was restful. I’ll figure Shedir out tomorrow.

Emily got Christmas presents from her grandparents and cousins. From her cousins, she got two Ty girls, so it’s just as well Santa decided they were an okay gift and brought them, because she would have gotten some anyway and then Santa would have looked like a piker. Yeesh. Anyway, now she’s got four, so she’s well on her way to a collection. And believe me, with her autism driving her toward a desire for full sets and completeness, she’s a natural-born collector.

We’re all tired now. As for me, first thing tomorrow I’ll have to hit the office store – my printer cartridge ran out of ink and I need to print out more patterns. Now that I have the pattern in a nice tidy pdf (thanks, knitter Dave from the Apple store), I want to take it to a print shop and get a quote on having a bunch printed for me. I have a feeling that four pages, full color, front and back, on index card stock is going to be a little pricey. I’d like to do a redesign into a booklet form, but I don’t really have time. Besides, this pattern works really, really well in its current form. I wouldn’t want to shrink the type or pictures too much. Until the holidays are over, I guess I’ll stick with my ink jet.

There are things I want to do in Dragonrealms before the festival closes, but I’m having trouble making time. Em goes back to school on Wednesday, so maybe I can sneak in a few things if all goes well.

Until tomorrow, I leave you with this picture of Emily borrowing her cousin’s Christmas gift – a Hannah Montana wig. Emily now wants one. Well, her ambition is to be a rock star, so I suppose it’s only natural. Just call her Emily Tennessee!

Apparently the holidays upped my niceness quotient, because now I’m up to #3 if you search for “nice lady” on Google. Nicest lady, here I come!

The dragon baby hat is done, as you can see. I’ll bring it to my knitting group tonight, since a couple of our members were keen to see it.

I’m putting aside a couple of non-Jayne projects to make a chemo cap that a relative just asked for for a friend of hers. She’s requested Shedir. Of course, she has no idea how much trouble that pattern is, but compared with having cancer, knitting that hat is a piece of cake. I’ll pick up the yarn today and get started. I’m happy I can help someone in this way.

Hey, does that move me up to #2 nicest lady? No? Darn!

Grocery shopping late at night just before Christmas is good, in that it cuts down on the crowds, and bad, in that the produce selection is awful.

Hot cocoa with peppermint schnapps is delicious. Thanks for a lovely evening, Rachel!

In other news, I’m taking a Jayne break until after Christmas. Currently on the needles is a non-Jayne order, a dinosaur/dragon hat like the one pictured at left, but for a baby. Instead of the Lamb’s Pride worsted pictured, I’m using Karabella Aurora 8 for machine washability. There are about a million ends to weave in on these, but the end effect is always worth it.

Also, Christmas-themed stitch markers. Here’s hoping it warms up soon, because what I learned from these is that the vapor from the sealant really doesn’t dissipate indoors, no matter how many precautions you take. Is that tipsiness from the schnapps or the sealant? The world may never know!

My day, my planned evening, and a monkey head.

Call me old-fashioned, but I like the first few days of Spring to be filled with flowers and sunshine, not wind and sleet. I went a mile on the treadmill this morning, because the weather was unpleasant. Fortunately, I have discovered the wonder of podcasts, and so I listened to a “best of NPR” type selection which was pleasant. I hope to check out knitcast tomorrow. Unfortunately, I think I need some noise-cancelling headphones. I’m uneasy with turning up the old earbuds that high to overcome the roar of the treadmill.

It looks like my swappee from the fibergoddaughter swap isn’t going to be able to post pics anytime soon, so here’s one item that I sent her that I thought was kind of nifty.

It’s felted soap, which is just roving wet-felted around a bar of soap. So it’s a bar of nifty soap encased in its own washcloth, basically. It lathers GREAT. If you squeeze it out between uses, it does last a nice long time. I’ve used this stuff and I love it. I may have to make myself some more soon. Heck, I make some for others, if there’s demand.

Knitted another repeat of the cable pattern on Shedir, which is looking much better to my eye now that I can see its shape emerging. I’m alternating using cable needles and not using them, just because sometimes it feels unwieldy to do some of the crosses without them. I’m happy with it so far. (, if you look closely, you’ll see that I’m using your stitch markers. Thanks again!)

I’m watching “A History of Violence,” which should be titled “A History of People Getting Parts Of Their Face Shot Off In Gory Closeup.” William Hurt hasn’t even shown up yet, and you just know he can ramp up the crazy factor by a power of ten. Good movie, don’t get me wrong, but I’m off of hamburger for a while for sure.

Jayne hats are chugging along. , you’re #2 on the list!

As time went on last night, the hair got more and more rounded at the sides, until I resembled a Powerpuff Girl. Specifically Buttercup.

I showered and blew it dry today, and it just wasn’t getting any better, so I have an appointment tomorrow for them to fix it. I thought maybe I could salvage it, or learn to like it… but no. If I had to pick one word for this haircut, aside from “bad,” it would be “dowdy.” Yesterday’s decade-old picture aside, I currently have a round body and a round head, I do not need a round haircut to complete the set.

And speaking of hair, check out the stylin’ newly discovered lobster! People in various fiber communities were speculating as to whether you could spin up the fur. Me, I just think it’s cool.

And speaking of fiber… okay, that was a weak segue, but just go with it… a local yarn store just started carrying Rowan Calmer. Usually I’m a big snob when it comes to acrylic, but this is such a soft, springy cotton/acrylic blend that I couldn’t pass it up. I’ve been wanting to knit Knitty’s Shedir anyway, and it only takes one ball. So in honor of St. Patrick’s Day, I’m working on a khaki green cabled cap.

For some of it I’ve cabled without a cable needle, but those bits have tended to be sloppier-looking. I’m trying to decide whether to plow on through and potentially pick up a handy new technique, or to make it look nicer with a needle. In the long run, perfecting up a new technique would be good. We’ll see how it goes.

We went out of town this weekend for the kiddo’s birthday celebrations. After last year’s disaster, we opted to keep it low-key, so it was just grandparents and us.

Finished up a couple of Jayne hats, but there’s a hitch. I’ve only got enough orange on-hand to complete a few more, and the mill won’t be winding any more gigantic cones for another week and a half. So tomorrow I canvas the state for loose skeins. This shortage won’t put anybody off schedule, since I’ve got enough to go through Jan 24th or so, but I get antsy when I can see the end of the yarn in sight. Note that the pic below shows the yarn I got in February for Jayne hats. The orange cone had 2000 yards on it.

Consider that the UK release of Serenity debuted at number one on the bestseller charts there, and the resulting uptick in UK requests over the weekend, and you can see why I am antsy about needing more yarn.

, you’re at #6.

When travelling to the in-laws, I like to take a few other projects with me to work on. So ‘s scarf is about 3/4 of the way done. Old pic, sorry. Also, I was working on something with Berroco Chinchilla. It is soft and lovely, but I had forgotten how much the dark blue stains. If ever you want to realize just exactly how you hold your yarn when you knit, just work up a little bit of this stuff and all will become clear. Maybe I’ll just give the finished garment a little rinse before passing it along, lest the wearer turn Smurfy blue without realizing it.

Speaking of Berroco yarns, I got to go to a Berroco trunk show premiering their new yarns for Spring. A few were nice, but many were fugly with a capital F. I also got to see, in person, some of the horrific things from the Berroco site featured in You Knit What? Talk about abuse of granny squares. Also, this poor woman apparently has moths the size of Volkswagens.

And now, I’m totally beat, and will actually turn in at a semi-reasonable hour. Mark this day in the record books!

I made Odessa for a friend. FO pics and notes below, to remind myself when I want to do this again.