Whoopseedoodles

Haha, I forgot I had a knitting blog, oops.

I was totally going to take pictures of a bunch of FOs that don't already have pictures, but then it was dinner time and then it was dark, and I don't like taking pictures without natural light because artificial light makes everything yellower than it actually is.

So, upcoming pictures:

Rogue
Two-Toned Shrug
Indigo Ripples skirt (although maybe not, because I have the sneaking suspicion it's going to be real saggy and therefore frogged--my gauge was so off on this one but I already frogged it once and was not emotionally stable enough to do it again).

Also, I'm working on a Best Friend Cardigan for my teddy bear I made five years ago (at Build-a-Bear) because I picked the most ghetto clothes for it and then it traded clothes with the gf's cow (her myspace page is all about this cow...I'm not kidding) and as a result it doesn't look like a girl bear (which she IS, I swear). Also her pants got lost. Those Build-a-Bear animals really don't like to keep their pants on, the cheeky scamps.

So, I MUST take pictures tomorrow. There might also be dyeing adventures tomorrow; it all depends on whether or not I am feeling adventurous (probably not. I'm on generic Ambien right now and it makes me feel extremely sluggish, which is saying a lot considering I was already basically stationary before I started the sleeping pills. I was just awake more of the time...most of the time, really). But I did buy an ungodly amount of Wilton's icing dyes, and I do have an ungodly amount of undyed wool yarn, so we'll see how it goes.

I also broke my no-more-yarn rule when the big ol' skeins of Sugar 'n' Creme were on clearance at Michaels. I bought two (they were two bucks a pop), and expect to make several dishcloths...eventually.

Shazzam!

Aaaand I finished the shrug. Yesterday. All that's left is to weave in the ends and that will be fun for about two minutes and then I'll wish I'd just gone with the original pattern's color dealie (i.e. NO STRIPES, what was I THINKING).

I've never had a shrug before and I totally used to make fun of the stupid ones that were in fashion when I was in...junior high? You know, the ones made of T-shirt material that weren't even supposed to reach your boobs (or maybe I was just really busty in junior high? I was fashion-retarded up until about...okay, never mind). Anyway, I'm not entirely sure it fits me right. The back seems to be the right size and the sleeves are fine, but I've just never worn a shrug-like object since junior high, so I'm not sure how it's supposed to look on a not-model (I was no longer a model by junior high, for those of you keeping track--wait, I don't think I've included that bit of information in this blog). I'll post pictures eventually, but right now my hair looks bad, so no pictures today. Maybe tomorrow.

If Knitting Were Video Games, I'd Be My Girlfriend

Yeah, the title is an inside joke that only my girlfriend would get, and even then I might have to explain it to her, because the jokes I make that I actually think are clever are usually inside jokes with myself. It is a lonely person who has inside jokes with herself. And yet, maybe she is the luckiest person of all. What am I talking about?

I've got maybe 3 more rows left on the ribbing of my Fitted Knits (*cough* Gryffindor *cough*) shrug, and now I'm really unmotivated to finish it. This always happens when I'm knitting big-ish projects. The very first sweater I ever knitted needed a neck for the longest time. It just sat in pieces under my bed while I putzed around NOT getting the double-pointed needles I needed to do the turtleneck. Of course, it was because I was a freshman in college and had no transportation to any craft store, and I was only just discovering the world of online shopping (I made my first eBay purchases that year!). I ended up deciding to split up the neckline and do them on straights...BIG MISTAKE, my friends. That was also the year I found out that I bound off too tightly. Also, the sweater itself ended up pretty fugly.

The next sweater I knitted was Stefanie Japel's Bad Penny from Knitty. I got some yarn off eBay and had to resize the entire pattern because the yarn was way thicker than the recommended yarn, which was fine because it knitted up quicker, but then with just the neckline ribbing left, I sort of ignored the sweater for six months. Seriously, I had it almost done around this time two years ago, and I let it sit until winter break. Then I finished it and gave it to my friend and it looked WONDERFUL on her.

So, if you're keeping track, that's one Good Sweater, one Awful Sweater.

The next sweater I knitted was Rogue. I finished all the pieces last summer, including the sleeves, and didn't seam it up for MONTHS. I finished the pieces in August...and then around the end of March (of THIS YEAR) I decided I was too lazy to seam up the sleeves, so I frogged them and re-knit them in the round, put off sewing them in for a few weeks, finally got off my ass and did it, and was done by the end of April (I had other projects I was working on in between). And that one turned out good too!

I don't know why I put off finishing sweaters; maybe it's because of that first awful sweater I made? I want to knit sweaters, but I think there's that fear that after all that knitting, it will turn out ugly, and all my work will have been for nothing. But I've got better odds than I thought, so maybe if I finish up this one TODAY, about two weeks after I started it, I'll break my knitting curse, hooray!

Oh, and as for the inside joke, whenever my girlfriend is playing some RPG or whatnot (Final Fantasy, etc), when she gets close to the end, say, right before the final boss, she STOPS PLAYING. For WEEKS. At first it is just because she is leveling up, but then after that I don't know what her excuse is. It took her practically a year to give back Final Fantasy X-2 (which she borrowed from me when we were seniors in high school...I didn't get around to playing it until my sophomore year in college, but I don't think it's because she took THAT long to give it back), and that game is NOT hard. If I can easily beat it, it is NOT hard. So there you go: metaphor explained.

I think this post was super long just so I could avoid a) finishing my shrug, or b) doing that 7-minute ab workout. Really, that's just seven of the longest minutes in my day, but I'll have ripped, sexy abs just in time to go back to school in landlocked St. Louis, with no beach that I know of. And this winter I'll knit 100 wool sweaters and be finished just in time for summer (I'm kidding; I'm allergic to wool).

Knitting is Dangerous! Just Like Figure Skating (or: Ask Me About My Spinal Injury)

Today I was closing the door while holding up my shrug (with the sleeve on size 6 DPNs) and I guess I wasn't quite out of the doorway yet, because as I pulled the door towards me, I managed to stab myself really deeply with one of the DPNs! Seriously, my shoulder went out for a few minutes and I was terrified.

Then I remembered Heath Ledger had a similar stab wound in "A Knight's Tale," and I felt awesome, because I am lame like that.

Here's a picture of what I've got so far:

That's my beanie baby monkey holding it, because the monkey was there and it's really cute! Hooray for the bar pattern. Those are totally not what the colors are, but whatever. Crazy digital cameras.

Also, here's a felting project I did way back in April. I made a fox and a rabbit (pattern courtesy of craftyalien) and called them Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit and gave them to my boss at the Humanities Digital Workshop, who liked the idea of a neon pink Brer Rabbit. Anyway.

I love the fox, but the rabbit is kind of iffy. Eh, whatever. I also made a cat from one of the patterns and it turned out awful. In addition, I am not so great at felting. These were my first felted projects EVER.

Augh. Seriously.

I just realized I don't have enough of the yellow yarn to do as many stripe repeats as I was planning to do in my shrug, so I've frogged most of it except the first four rows. I just have to keep telling myself that horizontal stripes aren't my thing and it's all for the best that I stopped it before I finished and looked like a giant bumblebee.

But dang it, I have to keep frogging things! It's making me super depressed.

The Last Place You Look

So, I'm always saying that I'll post pictures of whatever I'm knitting/doing/seeing on the street except that I can never find my camera. Then, when I do find it, I need to recharge the batteries. Of course, now that I have finally found my camera and I have some FOs to take pictures of, I've completely lost the battery recharger.

ARGH, indeed.

We'll just have to make do with not-so-very detailed summaries. I've been working on the Indigo Ripples skirt (from the Spring IK), but I'm horribly afraid that it's going to look super frumpy on me, what with the giant rear and not-so-great yarn sub (cotton-ease, which I hear is sort of awful? The fabric feels nice to me but I don't own skirts, knitted or otherwise, so I have no idea how it's going to turn out).

I'm also about a third of the way through the first sleeve of the Cambridge sweater (having finished all the body pieces) from last summer's IK for the gf, but it's just so incredibly boring, and the acrylic yarn (TLC Essentials, which is a LOVELY yarn, considering--my gf has wool issues and I don't trust her not to felt things anyway) on the plastic dpns makes the most awful noise. I can handle nails on a chalkboard, but not acrylic on plastic dpns? I keep throwing the sleeve away in frustration, since I will eventually have to make another, and that is enough to frighten me.

So, I decided to do something quick, and seeing as I just bought the Fitted Knits book and joined the KAL (I have yet to post), I chose the Two-Tone shrug. I guess this summer is all about clothing I don't already own (i.e. skirts, shrugs, etc). I'm doing it in Gryffindor colors and hope to have it finished by the premier of SOME Harry Potter-related thing next week, even though I identify as a Hufflepuff. I had all this burgundy yarn sitting around and not a lot of yellow left after the two Hufflepuff scarves I made a couple of years ago and I've got a self-imposed no-more-yarn-until-some-goes-away rule, so I figured I'd make do with what I've got. I'm about halfway through the body part (not the ribbing) and hope for the best. Anyway, now it's dinner time so I guess I'll end this ridiculously long post. It's because I've got new-blog-zeal.

Call Me Jayyne Johnstone

I'm loving that you can change the address of your blog. I've changed it three times today already. One day I'll settle. Or I'll just keep putting Ys in my address. Hooray!

Huh. Here we go.

So, I made up this blog on a whim so I could start a knitblog, because for some reason whenever I talk about stuff I like to do on my other blog, people (i.e. "friends") JUDGE me (i.e. "I read all that bullshit you wrote about your new tin whistle!"--as though I'm supposed to talk about Canadian folk singers all the time and NOT about whether or not the C# of the nickel whistle is flat in comparison to the one actually made of tin--bear with me; there's a lot of buried angst).

Of course, I'm not entirely sure if my camera will upload to this computer because I have lost the software to install it, but I suppose that is for another day. I also haven't quite figured out this whole blogger dealie, since I have previously been using Xanga (because I am AzN) and livejournal (because I am a Witty College Student), plus myspace (because I am a tool--not that blogging of any sort makes me any less tooly. I kind of like that word, and wish it was my blog name...I will probably change it one day).

Well, that's enough for now. Time to fiddle around with the design schemes because I have little to no html skillz (I can make things bold sometimes) despite the ability to encode ENTIRE BOOKS in XML (it's not that great an ability; I don't actually understand what I am doing).

I will probably eventually get sick of this blog too, but oh well.