Half done

I figure the back plus the left front means I am half done with Swan. Photos:

The front is now off the needles & I've done 5 rows of the right front. I'm sort of dreading the sleeves, since my row gauge on this project is way off. I ended up knitting 22 rows for the armhole on the front.. so when it comes to sleeves, I'll probably have some calculating to do to figure out how wide the sleeves need to be.

Progress on whales: nil. I knit the 4 rows of little peaky waves and a few rows beyond that.. but then figured out that I should have had 5 rows of waves and had made a couple other mistakes. So I tinked back all the way to the end of the blue. I'm hoping to finish Swan this weekend & get back to whales.

Today's humor: I was up at 12:15 am last night, watching Aqua Teen Hunger Force. This ad comes on: "Do you hit the snooze alarm in the morning? Feel like you're dragging by mid-afternoon? Need a second cup of coffee to get going? Well..." and I'm thinking... GO TO BED, YOU IDIOT. "... you need this fancy pants matress.". Talk about hitting your target audience. Yep, they're exhausted all right. Yep, they're too dumb to go to bed. They might just buy your matress! In a rare moment of strength, I used the power of laughter to tear myself away from the shiny pictures. I shut the TV off & went to bed.

Whales!

In my aspect as Easily Distracted Woman, I've dropped all other projects and have been working exclusively on the Myosotis cardigan for Julie B. Cast on Sunday and finished the blue bit with the whales in yesterday morning. I showed my progress photo to a couple friends and they actually recognized the grey blobs as whales! Huzzah! Photos:

I found a web site which describes the colors associated with French color names for silk embroidery thread and discovered that Myosotis (which means forget-me-not) is used a color name French. It's apparently a "pale dusty blue". And in the magazine, that's the color they used. I've chosen a slightly darker blue, so the pattern name is now completely divorced from the actual object. Oh well!

Wednesday night I stopped by Knitting Arts to pick up an interesting yarn to make string ties for the Florella baby set and get some advice on my 2 stalled Colinette projects. I picked Tweedy Cotton Classic from Tahki in rasperry/pale pink/chartreuse/cream/lilac tweed. I hope it will add just the right amount of jazz to the solid color sweater set. All the ends are woven in and we're planning to be at home tonight, so maybe it will finally get washed - a week after coming off the needles. Baby Jocelyn was due early this week, so I'd better get a move on!

On a side note... I'm becoming rather nervous about my punctuation. I've read about half of "Eats, Shoots, & Leaves" - a surprisingly fun book about the history & foibles of punctuation. Trouble is, some of her negative examples, like "No dogs please," did not even phase me a bit. (Punctuated like this, it's a statement. And patently false, as many dogs DO please. It's what they do best!)

Trouble is, it makes me think about each comma, dash, & my favorite, the elipsis. I'm sure it will wear off in a few months, but it's interesting to become aware of something you were totally taking for granted. Like buying a new car & discovering that there are HUNDREDS of your car on the road. I now see punctuation everywhere!

Mooooo!

Look, titles!

I've been doing some remedial blog reading to get the lay of the land. Looked a bit at Rob's blackdog blog, where his enthusiausm for yarn & projects must doing wonders for his sales, and Wendyknits and Bonne Marie. Rob & Matt's Charlotte's Web color combinations made me want to haul my own Charlotte's Web colors out of the closet & get knitting.. but I've got to work on Swan, Myosotis & Bill's sweater for a while.

The knitting blogs were inspiring and a bit daunting at the same time. Queer Joe's knitting blog particularly made me ask myself, am I adding anything to the craft here? And my kntting group at work is sort of falling apart... bleah.

Discovered yesterday that my row gauge on the Swan is waaaay off - like, I should have 16 or so inches at this point, and I've got 9. I could just keep knitting straight, but that would change the line of th garment from a nice neat trapezoid to a trapezoid with a box on top... so that will have to be ripped out entirely (I could save the last 4 rows..but why bother?) and started over. It was only 2 days of work. :-(( We're off on a birding adventure today, so I'll have plenty of time in the car for unknitting & reknitting. And I'd better get going if I want to see them birdies!

Swan

Hazy but beautiful day today. No knitting this morning, but I am working on the seam of the lilac bootie for Wendy. Still fussing about whether to have ribbon ties or crochet chain ties for the ensemble.

Tagliatelli Swan
Got started on the "bed jacket" project last night. Knit about 10 rows, ripped back 6 and re-did them with the decreases which make the a-line styling for the body. I started using just one ball of Tagliatelli, but I was reading the yarn label last night with its stern warnings to use 2 balls at once to smooth out the variations in hand-dyed skeins. Will add the 2nd one tonight.

Here's my progress so far:

As I was knitting last night, we watched the end of Angela's Ashes and all of Miyazaki's Castle in the Sky. Sent them both back to Netflix this morning, but I'm feeling a little bad about having knit thru the beautiful animation of Castle in the Sky. May have to make a new rule not to knit during anime.

Hello world!

I'm starting again with my not-yet-fascinating knitting blog. New plan: start simple. I read about 9 months of Jerry-the-old-fart's blog, When Knitting was a Manly Art, and was totally fascinated. So I'm back on the horse. I'm not yet whether I have the stamina to sustain a blog, but I really want a record of my knitting life, so here goes.

Knitting
With the last stitches done this afternoon, I am almost finished with a layette called Florella for Wendy's impending baby. Found the pattern online with some other antique knitting patterns. Apparently it's from a 1943 pattern book. I've done the whole set in light lilac Dale Baby Ull. Remaining work is the seam along the bottom & back of one bootie and finding/making strings for 2 booties, 1 hat and the sacque. Wendy's baby is due sometime this week or next.

Update 13-May-2004: Here's yesterday's photo of the mostly finished layette.

This pattern was very annoyingly written, with lots of K7, K2, K3tog... without much explaination of what was going on. I had to make a lot of adjustments for a gauge of 7 sts/inch instead of 8, so I spent a long while with a calculator figuring out how to adjust the decreases & pattern motifs. It was a combination of math and winging it, heavy on the winging it. Overall, I'm satisfied with the results. There are no finished measurements given in the original pattern, but if my math is right, my version is actually the same size as the 7 sts/inch version would have been. It's supposed to fit a 6 month size. Remains to be seen if it will fit Wendy's baby.

Plans
I've, um, been to the yarn shop rather a lot lately. But mostly with very concrete plans in mind. Here's what's in the hopper - without counting unfinished objects:

- For Kelli, a cheer-up bed jacket while on bed rest. Bought some Tagliatelli yarn in Morocco and a pattern for a short-sleeved cardigan called Swan. This is the first in line because I think she needs it now. Mom says I have to modify the neckline because it's too droopy. I think a little crochet will firm it up.

- For Julie, a baby outfit (hat and cardigan) by August. Picked design #2 called Myosotis, from Anny Blatt's "Layette", Hors-serie No. 8, with grey whales in a blue background. The name is weird, because as far as I can tell, Myosotis means forget-me-not.

- For Bill, a Rowan Denim gansey in the darker blue Nashville. This project has been simmering in the idea stage for about 6 years and he's getting antsy

- For me, Fog Chaser jacket from The Knitter's Stash with 4 different yarns from Mountain Colors, mostly color Wilderness