Growing

These are my tiny tomato plant seedlings! The reaction I had when these little guys sprouted up over night was akin to the reaction Tom Hanks' character in Castaway had when he finally made fire. "I have made plants, from tiny lifeless seeds in a packet. I have made plants!" As you can tell, I am not much of a green thumb. Truth be told, I've never planted anything and had it live. (Herbology, D for Dreadful, sigh.) We'll see how this goes, but I'm looking forward to some heirloom Brandywine tomatoes circa 1885.

This is my Gathered Pullover. The color is a bit off, but trust me, it's a light blue with hints of purple-e-ness. Yup. 6" of knitted tube. Ok, moving on ...

[Side Note: My nifty new Options circular needle, via knitpicks, is having a problem. The one side won't tighten up. It's doing it on both ends, and on another cable as well. I called knitpicks to see if I might be doing something wrong and they are sending me new interchangeable heads! Now that's customer service! Meanwhile, my knitting sort of catches in that space, which is cumbersome and also rather annoying, so that sweater is in timeout until the new needles arrive.]

Here we have my bubble wrap. It's actually called the Soap Bubble Wrap, but bubble wrap sounds more fun to me. Bubble wrap also = entertainment, who knew? Try the Manic Mode, you'll be glad you did.

...I thought you would be shinnier

I received Free Range Knitter as a Christmas gift and I must say, I thought it would be bigger.  You know, like "coffee table" books are.  With glossy pages.  I'm not sure why I thought this and I am certainly not disappointed with the little gem of knitting humor and life lessons that showed up in snowman paper under the tree.  I'm zipping right through it and enjoying every page!

Knitting philosophy has never been done better.  It also really makes me think about things I probably wouldn't have thought to think about before.  Yeah, deep, I know.

There is a particular chapter where she talks about being a young, yarn-poor knitter that I can really relate to (gee, I wonder why?).  I must say though, yarn really has come a looong way since the plastic crap she describes and some acrylic these days is pretty darn good.  It's not wool, or alpaca, but it's being the best it can be.

[Side Note: Thank the yarn-gods for the advent of internet yarn stores that email sale info and coupons!  That's how I got the Noro cashmere blend for my striped scarf for <$15!]

I get to have occasional tastes of the "good life" but I can manage within my means too.  As a matter of fact, the Practice Sweater (of Summer 08 fame) has turned into my go-to sweater for around the house.  It cost me about $8.00 in yarn to make and it is holding up remarkably well (with a little fuzzing that I don't mind at all).  

One day, money will be less scarce and I'll have more knitting freedom, but I think the knitting joy will stay the same :-)  Thanks Stephanie Pearl-McPhee for a thoughtful, philosophical knitting book that is most deserving of great big glossy pages and a position of prominence on the coffee table!

P.S. Thanks for the book mom!

Not so easy afterall.

Thumbs help. So does not drooling on the yarn. Or rolling in it. Doesn't mean I don't do it too, but it's easier if you dont.

Welcome Dolores Van Hoofen and fellow Fibertarians!

Franklin, of Panopticon fame, has decided to send Fibertarian Party Candidate Dolores Van Hoofen on a cross-country campaign tour and I have been trying to track her down for some photo opportunities all week. Unfortunately, I live in Las Vegas, NV and Dolores has been busy.

Luckily for her, many new establishments have sprung up since the last time, and she has yet to be banned from them. That's not to say that casino security doesn't keep a close eye on her though. As well they should.

As a matter of fact, I haven't seen Dolores since I dropped her off at Bellagio days and days ago. And by "dropped off" I mean that I chauffeured her around for an hour before she decided to hop out, in traffic, to do some shopping and has been busy ever since. I did get a photo as she leaned on the driver's side window to tell me not to wait up.

Dolores Van Hoofen is my kind of candidate!

I do not concede.

This is the Draco colorway of the Opal Harry Potter series of yarn. I borrowed the pictures from Webs and Opal to illustrate a point [Side Note: Webs may still have some in stock in all the colors, hurry! I'll be here when you get back.] I know that you can see green in it. I can see it too. But my skein doesn't have any of this green in it. Mine has many shades of blue, and NAVY where the green should be. I'm going to unravel the whole damn thing when I get home and there had better be green in it. Otherwise, I have to learn German in order to pen a linguistically and gramatically correct crazy-person letter to Opal asking them Wo ist das Grün in meinen Dracosockenwollen? Hey, that wasn't so difficult. Or I could buy a solid green skein and intersperse its slytherin-y goodness as I desire. But I prefer the crazy-German-letter-writing.

The Dark Mark: a knitting chart

This is the little surprise freebie I've been working on! It's a *NEW AND IMPROVED * knitting chart for the Dark Mark (of Harry Potter fame ... but if you didn't know that, you may not care about the chart anyways).

Please click on the photo to make the photo bigger.
Please click RIGHT HERE to Download the .pdf File

I absolutely LOVED the chart by Storm Moon Knits! So, I went with the "imitation is the most sincere form of flattery" approach and made up one of my own. It's pretty different though, as far as two charts of the same subject are able to be. [Side Note: If you are, in fact, Lindsay Henricks of Storm Moon Knits fame and you don't like me doing this, let me know! Also, holy crap! People actually read this thing?]

While the original is, I believe, much more true to the book representation, my version is more closely modeled after the movie representation. Perhaps I am just splitting hairs.

I have something planned for this little chart, but I'm going to see how it turns out before I go and blog it to death. I'll keep you posted.

Justification Plz?

I wanted a rugby style sweater, cardinal and gold with USC pride in every stitch, to wear to homecoming this year. I have hoodies and jackets and my Gryffindor SC scarf, but my jerseys are getting worn out. And they have acquired a beer smell that won't come out.

[Side Note: My mom tossed them in the wash just before the Stanford game last year. Their first washing since the National Title. Collective gasp anyone? Her argument was "I can't even wash the smell out, how can you possibly belive that I washed the 'luck' out?!?". Coincidence? I think NOT.]

Besides, ol' #11 and #5 have long since moved on to NFL careers, but haven't reached the epic status that allows alums to wear #34 around.

It's ok though because I am coping with my Paranoid Sweater Phobia quite well and ordered yarn from Webs for the project. It's the Quidditch Sweater from Charmed Knits (because the more I knit, the more I love this book cover to cover). $34 including shipping and I will have a great sweater by November-ish. {Insert plot twist here}

But then I found this:

For the low low price of $27.99! And it got me to thinking. Yes, dangerous 'thinking'. Even with shipping, it comes out the same as the yarn + notions and involves Zero work on my part. I never should have signed up for the damn e-newsletter at Whimsic Alley.

>:~[ (That's my scowling Snape smiley, haha)

Yes, I'm still making my sweater, believing that it will be far superior to the mass produced model in quality, durability, and warmth. And because denial isn't just a river in Egypt anymore.

Just because I can ...

... doesn't mean I will.

I saw these knitted pillow covers in a catalog for a store (new to my area) called West Elm. My immediate thought was "I could knit that." And I very well could. But I'm not going to. Because I don't need (or particularly desire) these pillows. It's just nice to see that knitty things can make it in this post-modern loft-style hipsters catalog. :-)

P.S. They have a bazillion other things that I do really want and definitely can't knit. Like a desk chair.

Ulterior (Sock) Motives

I have a confession to make: I have only soldiered on in my sock attempts to prepare myself for some Opal yarn in the Harry Potter colorways. They come out in the fall, sometime before the movie. Since I've decided that I must possess them all, I feel a little obligated to actually make them into something. Though the prospect of just keeping the lovely skeins around (or having them framed) is quite appealing to me :-)

This got me thinking about the role the HP series has played in my knitting. After reading the books and having myself sorted (via sortinghat.com or something like that) into Slytherin I decided that I must have a scarf. [Side Note: Again, I'm not a bad person; though I suspect that my ambition can sometimes set my moral compass spinning, it does find itself again eventually.] I put aside the fact that I seldom visit latitudes North of, oh, Southern California or so, and sought out a Slytherin scarf for myself.

When I finally found a store selling them I couldn't bring myself to pay some $27 dollars for it. The USC bookstore sold a lovely Gryffindor 'SC scarf that fall for the bargain price of $10 and I caved, but it still wasn't the same. I felt like I was misrepresenting myself by wearing it to the movie premier. Weird huh? I found plenty of other things in WhimsicAlley to amuse me for hours on end (including a quill pen and ink, and a Dark Mark temporary tattoo), but the crafty part of my brain was whirring along at full tilt. "How are scarves made? They look woven together, not sewn up patches of color. Gee, I wonder how they do that. OH, knitting would do that ... right?" is how my internal monologue went. TO THE INTERNET!

After some brief googling I discovered that people can, in fact, knit these things themselves! I dashed out to Michaels, bought a skein of green and one of grey and a pair of needles. I had no regard for the type of yarn, it's gauge, or even the size of the needles really, so you probably know how this turned out. I worked diligently on my very first project and once I had mastered the Knit and Purl stitches (and realized that Knitting on BOTH sides means you end up with garter stitch) the scarf seemed to fly off the needles. Of course I was using US 10s (because 10 sounded like a nice round number at the time). I was very proud of my efforts, but not so much of the scarf. I had picked up reading a few knitting related sites and had learned so much that, despite the lacklustre scarf, I was hooked (or knitted, rather, as this isn't crochet afterall).

The scarf eventually ended up being ripped out and used to make Salazar the Bear. And I've never gotten around to making myself a proper Slytherin scarf either, but this doesn't trouble me much anymore because of a) the climate I live in and b) the fact that my halloween costume robe is Gryffindor too. [Side Note: this is because I could not find a suitable green lining fabric last year to save my life, but red was everywhere and on sale!]

Speaking of Sal though, I've found that his neck is a bit floppy which makes him look as if he's puzzled by something. Rather than busy myself with reinforcing his neck I decided to take a page out of Nearly Headless Nick's book and make him a scarf to hold his head up instead, haha! I took the book scarf pattern as it was originally posted and just kept knitting it until it was long enough for Sal. I'll have him try it on when I get home. [Imagine him with his head cocked to the side as if to say "For me?"]

Practice Makes Perfect

I'm not making a sweater. I'm just practicing by making all of the parts :-D Like today for instance, I knit a raglan sleeve in Cape Cod Blue. It turned out just right thanks to a fancy sweater calculator I found online at Knitting Fool. Just to make sure it wasn't an accidental success I will repeat the sleeve exercise tomorrow and then move on to practicing the front and back of a round neck raglan sweater. You know, they say practice makes perfect ;-)

That site again was http://www.knittingfool.com/pages/sweater_wheel.guest.cfm

Oh, this is nifty!

Mugglenet is reporting that the German based yarn company Opal has released a new fall '08 line of Harry Potter yarn! It's too bad the dollar is so weak (in comparison to the Euro, we seem to be holding our own with the Yuan for the moment), or I'd order myself some right now! I've got a powerful urge to get the Dumbledore yarn and make warm woolly socks out of it ;-)

"Half-Blood Prince Sneak Peek by way of Yarn company RupertGrint.net has spotted these new spools of yarn from German yarn company Opal. They have a new Half-Blood Prince collection with 8 color themes to be released Fall 2008. Each of the themes represents one character from the sixth Potter film and includes a picture.

Those characters include Harry, Ron, Malfoy, Lupin, Tonks, Dumbledore, and Hedwig. Tonks most notably has a new, much shorter, haircut. Check 'em out in our gallery!"

It's a Chart Maker, like a recipe card for knits...

I like this simple text based chart creator from Inna Zakharevich. It's text based, so you type in your pattern and it generates a chart for you. I've seen other sites that allow you to drag&drop stitches into a graph area, but once the initial novelty wears off it's just more time consuming. I prefer this one:

http://www.innaz.com/cgi-bin/makechart/makechart.cgi

Fair Isle (in the round no less!)

I like to take on new projects that challenge my knitting abilities, but this one was probably one of my most ambitious. It took me a few weeks of on-and-off knitting, but the satisfaction upon completion was well worth it!
This Gryffindor-inspired fair isle bag (that I've made into a pillow instead) came from the freebie pattern site I mentioned before: http://www.freshislefibers.com/Patterns/hpknittinglinks.htm
but was created by Rosemary Waits, of Quietish blog fame.

It's knitted in a plain ol' worsted weight Caron yarn on a 29" set of circular needles. I'm not precisely sure what size they are because I didn't buy them, they just sort of got passed down to me (though nobody in the fam. knits ...) They worked out just fine as far as the gauge went, so I'm not going to worry about it.

I pirated the pillow insert from one of my bed pillows though, just for testing/sizing/picture purposes, so it will have to be put back. Once I get another insert (16" please!) I'll sew up the ends and finish the pillow.

Here's a Site Worth Checking Out

Here's a great freebie site with all sorts of HP knitting projects. I've made a few of the items on here and will probably make quite a few more. Check it out!


http://www.freshislefibers.com/Patterns/hpknittinglinks.htm