Time!

Okay, a little housecleaning first:

In case you missed it in the comments, Necia (my SP) ALSO runs her own business making soaps and other bodycare products. (Note that sort of thing is pretty time-intensive.) So, let's amend that. She works, runs her own business, does an ungodly amount of crafting, AND raises a small child. (I'm going to assume she doesn't cook or clean. And honey, if you do, keep it to yourself!!)

So....does anyone else feel like a schlub, comparatively speaking? :-) Ah, it gives me something to aim for.

Now....today I read some of the blog of a commenter (but just one of the commenters - I have so very many that it's just impossible to keep up, you know). Purl Needlemeyer (how cute is that) wrote about a world record, and I decided to do a little experiment.

(Sidelining here for a minute - how badly do I want one of these Gettin' Knit Together kits? This is Ms. Needlemeyer's - seriously, I love that - brilliant invention for discombobulated knitters like me. My LYS must start carrying this. I need one. For real.)

So, on to the experiment....the fastest knitter in the world knits 255 stitches in three minutes. (See also: feeling like a schlub, definition 2.) I wondered how well I could fare in three minutes. (Heh.) Before I reveal my count, a few notes.

1. I am lazy. I'm not casting on for this sort of thing. So I worked with what I had, and what I had was my Picovoli.

2. My Picovoli is knit with Debbie Bliss Splittay Cathay, on Addi Torturas Naturas, the ones with the freakin' nightmare join that forces me to continually tug my knitting along for the workin', which is the only 24" size 4 circ I have. (I think - see also: need for Gettin' Knit Together kit, which includes a handy needle reference card that would tell me how much of each sort of needle I had....in what I consider to be a design glitch, however, it would fail to take me by the hand and show me where in my cave I might have left that needle - not that it would matter, because inevitably, it would not be there and would instead be found weeks later, covered in slobber and teeth marks, rendered useless, in the dog's crate.)

3. Stitch markers. Slipping a marker counted as a stitch (but I think, for some bizarre reason that involves how klutzy I am, it takes me much longer to slide a marker than it does to knit a stitch.)

4. OCD. I had to tink and re-knit a stitch that I deemed unsatisfactory. I counted this as three stitches (one to knit it wrong, one to tink it, one to knit it right.)

5. Stress. When I started, I fumbled quite a bit. I usually do well under pressure, but I was kind of tense during this. What - because there was so much riding on it? I don't know. I didn't adjust for stress, but I know I would normally knit faster than I did for the first 30-45 seconds.

So my total, given all that? 87. Well, 85 actual stitches, without that tink adjustment, or 83 stitches and two stitch markers....but hey, I might do way better with regular old yarn on regular old needles during regular old time. I'm pretty happy with this. Onward and upward! (I will never get anywhere near 255. I don't think I'd want to....knitting that fast doesn't even sound like fun. That's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it.)

Things Lately That Have Made Me Happy

With the arrival of terribly unhappy news (that is not knitting-related, and also not blog-appropriate) and other icky things (infections, hot weather, slow times at work, and self-imposed ultra-strict diet), I've decided to touch on a few things I've loved or will be loving:

1. I received my Lucy yarn from Socks That Rock. Rooster even took a fleeting interest in it (because it was almost, but totally not quite, as pretty as he is.)

2. I received my Kill Bill and Slayer (and Rusted, but that's for Travis) from Sweet Georgia. The Kill Bill makes me giggle every time I look at it.

3. Travis finished my first cedar cubby shelf for my yarn room! It's amazing and wonderful and stinks up the whole room with that lovely-to-me, loathsome-to-moths scent....the joyous odor of guaranteed wool safety. [Stocking up those shelves made me realize I have a LOT of yarn. Worse still (not that a lot of yarn is a bad thing), I have a LOT of single skeins. Ugh.]

4. I tried a new cast-on. (Baby steps.)

5. I'm rocketing along on my Picovoli. That is a whole crapload of stocking stitch...I think the Central Park Hoodie just moved up in ranks, and will be my next garment project instead of Hourglass. (Hourglass following Picovoli = enough plain stocking to make one think about knitting a noose...in fair isle, of course). And, since everyone hates posts with no pictures, here's something....a model in the Central Park Hoodie I intend to knit someday.



6. My LYS carries Malabrigo now!! This is very exciting stuff! (Okay, quick downside - at $15 a skein, it's a little higher priced than some places. So I'll just keep picking up the stuff for big projects from said other places. But a single skein here and there from the LYS can't hurt.)

7. My LYS is also having a big anniversary bash this weekend and I'm wicked excited. Travis is going with me (because there's food) and we were discussing duration last night. It starts at 3:00 and the shop usually closes at 6:00. The idea of three hours at a yarn shop horrified him, but I assured him that we wouldn't stay that long...unless of course Doni were to say "Hey, 60% off everything in the store...but only from 5:45 to 6:00!" But then I declared that I didn't need shouldn't buy any more yarn right now, and Travis declared, "For 60% off??!! Are you out of your mind? Buy, buy, buy!"

I think I love him.

I swear I am knitting. I'm just rotating projects and not actually finishing anything. I'm not Wendy, okay? I can't be expected to, you know, accomplish stuff.

You know what else, though? Since I've revealed myself to my Secret Pals, I can reveal them too! Necia was my SP8 pal, and I LOVED spoiling her. She was constantly into new hobbies (just in these three months, she added spinning and sewing to her repertoire) and, apparently, was blessed at birth with an 87-hour day. You should see how much spinning, knitting, and sewing she manages to accomplish. And she has a job. And a three year-old. (I always use that 40-hour-week excuse for not finishing anything...but apparently I have no right.) And Emily is my One Skein Pal, and she's a brilliant knitter, plain and simple. You should see the socks she just finished. Or her Hush, the nightie from Knitty (hee...alliteration). She also, unwittingly, taught me of the Waldorf School and how very much I'd like to send my future children there. (Emily and I have similar tastes in a lot of things - every time I shopped for her, it ended up being a "one for her, one for me" kind of thing. Oops.)

So go read their blogs. They've probably started and finished a project in the time it took me to write this post.

Erm, Oops.....

Yeah, I know, my posting sucks. I'm supposed to post once a week for SP8 purposes, and I've been failing. And I love writing! But I feel like I should have something to share in order to do so....

I do have some exciting fiber news, but no FOs to share. I'm working on some old WIPs (my Picovoli and those stupid boring Trekking socks for Travis) and have many more WIPs to pull out when I get done with those...plus the things I'm planning to start (Hourglass and Central Park Hoodie are at the top of the list.) Oh, and there's Travis' cousin's oncoming twins. They need goodies. I do have a few FOs, but I can't post them. You know how it goes.

I did get in on the Lucy colorway from Socks That Rock, and I'm anxious for that to arrive. Lucy's the same colors as my kitty Roosevelt, so I'm very excited about that.

I also ordered a few fun and amusing skeins from Sweet Georgia. Her colorways always crack me up - Kill Bill? Priceless.

I also ordered a whole slew of skeins of Debbie Bliss Merino (17 skeins, to be precise) from WEBS. I needed a good wool for my Central Park Hoodie (the one from the latest Knitscene, a pattern I had almost completely forgotten about until my SP giftee, Necia, mentioned it - I copied the pattern before zipping the mag off to her, as she was more in need of it than I was.) Did I mention that the yarn was TWO DOLLARS AND FIFTY CENTS a skein? Yeah. That's right. And, fight against it though I might, I bought green. I had three options, and I love green, but I ALWAYS do green, and the sample was knit in green (I'm usually determined to not knit the item as photographed)....but Jim, one of my gurus, gave me several very good reasons to do it in that color. I can't fight Jim. So that'll be a green Hourglass...and a green Central Park...and my green Odessa...and my teal Picovoli. I must do something different.

I'll have something finished.....someday.....

(Can I talk about Project Runway for a minute? I HATE the producers. I HATE that the show relies so strongly on "good TV" for its in-out decisions. Vincent is freaking worthless as a designer, and he's effing creepy as hell to boot - and I wish he hadn't said his own dress "gets me off" like four times because that further convinced me that the guy was one skein short of a sweater. But Alison? She was all that was goodness and light in the world. She was like sunshine and puppies, with fabulous fashion sense. I hate the producer-driven voting process. Eck. Oh, and did anyone notice that Vincent, in the same breath, said that his dress, "...gets me off...it's like a child's finger painting!" Oh my God. Ew. Ew ew ew. Get him out of here.)

Ooooh, Goodies!

I love days when the post delivers not one but TWO goody packages.

First off was my order from Amazon. (Just a couple of knitting books, nothing surprising there. I needed a pattern from Last Minute Knitted Gifts sort of ASAP, so I had to go ahead and order it, even though it was previously on Not-Dire status.)

But the other I actually didn't open right away. (By "not right away," I mean I waited about four minutes after getting home, allowing the suspense to build until I just couldn't stand it any more. Yeah, you can imagine how unbearable I am at Christmas time.)



My One-Skein pal sent me gifties! First, the soy silk yarn - I have been ITCHING to work with soy silk (even going so far as to purchase a bit of soy silk top during my Asheville fiber blitzkrieg...which fiber has yet to make it to spindle). I just haven't gotten my hands on the right yarn. My LYS carries a brand that feels lovely, but the shade selection wasn't to my taste, so I never bought any. I do, however, LOVE this blue. (If your LYS doesn't carry this yarn either, you can find it here, and there's even a few shades on sale!) That, and I am so tickled by tape yarns. I always play with the cotton tapes at my LYS - there's just something so amusing to me about yarn that looks like it's been knitted....and then you knit with it! (I'm so easily amused it's stupid.)

The book, Needled to Death (HA!!) is written by the author of Knit One, Kill Two (double HA!! - again, a tickle to my easily amused side). Please PLEASE note the ball of yarn/skull in the cover illustration. I kid you not, I spent a moment trying to figure out how I could wind my skeins to look like that. 'Cause it's so punk rock. I won't lie, I'm diving into this book as soon as I hit "publish" here. When I was in middle school, I went through an Agatha Christie phase, and then a Lillian Jackson Braun phase, and then a Sue Grafton phase, and then, far too young, a Dean Koontz phase - and my best friend and I traded those Young Adult thriller novels (Christopher Pike, anyone?) with alarming speed. My love affair with mystery novels is finely aged, unlike my love affair with knitting - but it runs just as deep. And who can resist a knitting murder mystery that includes a knitting pattern for a tank top and a recipe for blueberry pie? (July is Blue Month. She's good at continuity - remember the postcard that coordinated with the yarn back in June? Slick little thing, ain't she? Appeals very much to my easily-amused side AND my obsessive-compulsive side.)

Stirring The Beast Within

I've been home sick and feeling rather sorry for myself since Thursday evening. I figured I should try something new.



This began life as a plain old undyed skein of Lorna's Laces Sportweight. A few splashes of Kool-Aid later (and with thanks to my super-enabling Secret Pal!!!), I had a fruity skein of fun! I think I like hand-painting yarn - and I decided I don't completely suck at it, so I figured I'd keep trying!

I discovered (after attempts at three other local grocery stores) that our Kash & Karry has about 47 varieties of individual Kool-Aid packets, including the elusive brown Tamarindo (which, make no mistake, does not resemble anything I would EVER want to drink - but I am assured is a wonderful mixer for dyeing purposes.) So I now have 24 one-liter water bottles with pure Kool-Aid. 24 base colour options. Oh joy.

I'd wanted to dye a skein for my secret pal, but I decided I really didn't think the first one was quite the colours I'd like for her - a bit too pink, more my style than hers. So I picked up a few ivory skeins of Koigu (who doesn't love Koigu?) and tried again:



I gotta tell ya - I'm pretty good at this. (No, you hear no shame in my tone - I'm proud as hell of these skeins.) I named the colourway "Necia" (that's her name - I'm not being terribly original with the name, but what knitter girl doesn't want to see a skein of Koigu with, literally, her name on it??) I'll look forward to seeing how the stuff knits up - it may be tacky as hell knitted, but I sure do think the skeins are pretty.

My one-skein project has me worried. You should see what she did for her pal. I get the feeling she's a better knitter than I am. I must progress faster!!!

We went to Home Depot today and bought planks of cedar so Travis can build me some shelving units for my fiber room! Whee!! When you build furniture to support your hobby, it's officially here to stay.

Me & Knitting (/Spinning/Dyeing) 4-Eva!