So tonight, I ran into my sweetie on the subway while transferring @ Columbus Circle on the way home. As with most hardcore NYC commuters, I had mentally locked myself in a bubble while surrounded by gazillions of other New Yorkers, yet somehow I looked up to see my boyfriend sitting in the same subway car. He was very amused (I seem to generate this reaction a lot amongst my friends) and was wondering how long it would take me to notice him.It was a nice way to start the evening, as he and I had previously agreed to flee the vicinity of his apartment in Greenwich Village. Now while it may sound wildly exciting to live along the route of the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade ,in reality, it's frustrating enough to make your head explode: stampede-density spectators, most of whom are drunken non-natives, cops who demand ID to let you onto your own street, and sheer unrelenting noise...are you starting to get the picture? (Yes, I know -- I sound cranky, don't I?)
Anyway, instead, we spent a delightfully quiet evening at my apartment, scrounging up an Atkins-friendly dinner (for him) and anything else appealing (for me), reading (him), watching stuff on my TiVo (both of us: "Cheeeeeeese, Gromit!"), converting an old alumni e-mail account before it evaporated tonight (me), and of course, knitting (um, who do you think?).
Actually, I made some progress on the gargantuan moderne log cabin afghan I foolishly decided to give as a gift. Hooray! I think I will cheat, however, and not bind off every edge, as picking up stitches is not one of my favorite activities.
The brown/burgundy chenille is from Numei.com via eBay, doubled on #11s, with a strand of Debbie Bliss Cotton Denim Aran. The olive-y patch is also chenille from eBay, from that monster batch I posted about previously, doubled, with TWO strands of cotton yarn from School Products.
So okay, I may go crazy with the other blocks and triple the yarn or something, as these are not as thick as the first block. The remaining chunks of burgundy/wine will be combined with Lily Sugar & Cream, as the Debbie Bliss Cotton Denim Aran was merely an oddball I had left over from my apple hat, which had gone to the first child of the friend who received my log cabin blanket for her second child.
So now that I've started working on the wrist warmers, the idea of socks doesn't fill me with fear the way that it used to. Therefore, I have started to eye the remnants of an unfinished project from my sock class at Downtown Yarns from [an unknown number of] years ago.These are (still) on the original #4 dpns I bought for the class. Oops. And yet, I can indeed finish projects (really!) when properly motivated (i.e., black hair in the summer sun = solar heat collector) and so, with some guidance from my friend Jackie, voila! Bucket hat using Reynolds Saucy Sport cotton yarn.
In the meantime, I feel like an afternoon of watching football (Tampa Bay Bucs @ Jets.. no, wait! Giants! I meant Giants! 3 - 17 to the best of my recollection), searching Blogger for info on how to change default font formatting (aaarrrgghh!), and then watching a couple of episodes of the House marathon on USA (thank you TiVo, for letting me skip the commercials), has left my brain fried to a crisp. Gah!
So okay, I am perhaps avoiding the beginning of my new gi-normous afghan using the Mason- Dixon moderne log cabin pattern (which for some unfathomable reason, is currently available as a free pattern on Amazon's website) using my new Knitpicks Options circular needles (#11s w/ a 40" cable -- yum!) and vast quantities of chenille (boo!) I had accumulated from ebay binges.
Ironically, of course, I wound up spending more money in an effort to match the various colorways I had previously bought on ebay, with additional chenille (more ebay, see photo on left) and cotton cones (School Products). I'm nuts. This blanket is going to cost me a fortune.
My rationalization is that it's for a friend, who's at home convalescing from a stroke. And yes, there is a distinct possibility he will finish rehab before I finish the afghan. (Actually, that would be great! I think you know what I mean.)
Here’s an actual finished log cabin baby blanket in garter stitch, using a combination of fluffy Reynolds Cabana and Schulana Supercotton. It’s been shipped off to my friend in Canadia, er, I mean, Canada, where her son is currently drooling all over it. Heh.
My boyfriend (who observes my knitting obsession with amused anthropological interest, and the occasional helpful suggestion) helped me realize that the brown yarn, which otherwise didn’t really fit with the color scheme –- but which was also in the sale room of Seaport Yarn along with the other balls of Reynolds and Schulana –- would work well as a border, especially when one considers sticky/jam-covered little infant fingers.
Woe is me: at a mere 3 blocks from my office, Seaport is my LYS –- I am DOOMED.
So...um, there are 2 particular things which leave me pondering at the moment: (1) I knew that creating a blog about my knitting would interfere with actual knitting, since I can only do one thing at a time...ack! Must...put...down...laptop!(2) I succumbed to the brainwashing @ the Internet Librarian Conference and upgraded to the new 2.0 release of Firefox. (I still need to upgrade to XP/IE6.0 SP2 before I can upgrade to IE 7.0...one tech imbroglio at a time.) My boyfriend is amused each time I run into something that doesn't quite work right -- like the lack of a session saver extension for 2.0 -- and wishes me much happiness in my early adoption. Sigh. I might revert back to FF 1.5 since 2.0 still doesn't seem to like forms in webpages. We'll see. Oh! And FF 2.0 doesn't seem so happy with Blogger either, at the moment. Doh!Well, in order to at least remedy part of problem #1, I've discovered a great tactic to both (a) get time with my sweetie, and (b) crank out yardage: Sunday football viewing !He is patiently teaching my the finer points of football strategy (TiVo is great for freeze frame tutorials! heh) since I basically knew only about the 4 downs...he also gave me Watching Football (now only $2.99 on Amazon) by Daryl "Moose" Johnston so I can differentiate between all of the butts, uh..I mean, ends, and backs, and why the refs are so yellow flag happy, etc., etc. Although, like last year, my boyfriend has offered to forgo football on Sundays, I decided to use that time to my advantage (ha! see [a] and [b] above). Also, reading Michael Lewis' engrossing new book, The Blind Side whetted my appetite, and this from a football ignoramus. Then again, this is the guy who wrote Liar's Poker -- he could probably make paint peeling a gripping read.
Eureka! Here is my great-nephew, Thomas, in the sweater I made from Knit Picks Simple Stripes yarn for his baby shower in February. The free pattern on their site was a bit whacked, but I improvised, and it seems to have turned out okay.
I must admit, he is looking cuter as he gets older -- there seems to be someone home, if you know what I mean. Very young babies either (a) look like Yoda, and/or (b) don't really have a lot of personality yet (though they do make cute sighing/baby sounds).
So okay, maybe this might -- just might -- motivate me to work on that Lion Cotton Denim Swirl cardigan. I am guesstimating the cardigan measurements based on the raglan baby cardigan pattern I found on knitty, with the addition on a collar, which the knitty pattern does not have.
I did finish one in peach cotton -- 3 skeins of
Bernat Love Bug from my Smiley's Yarn Riot stash -- for a friend who is due next month. (Well... almost: I just have to [ugh] weave in the ends and oh yes, make the ties.) I used the knitty pattern as a basis for reverse engineering the pink Lion Cashmere baby cardigan (Pretty in Pink: pattern # 50678) from their new fall/winter 2006 catalog.
Hmmm...so I see that my laziness in using the camera in my cellphone yields a weird pinkish ring around the edges of all of my photos. Oops.
So okay, on the way out to lovely Monterey for the conference, I must, simply must have a project for what turned out to be a 10 hour trip. And a good thing I was so obsessive too: AA 0003 sat on the runway for 1:45 before even taking off, which meant, of course, that I missed the connecting flight to MRY, thereby leaving me stranded at LAX for 3 hours. And then there was the prop plane to MRY...it was time to bite the bullet and begin to use the dreary Lion Cotton Denim Swirl I bought years ago. (Well hey, I do have a great-nephew now...)
On the bright side, I came up with a new use for those fancy fabric shoe bags from ritzy hotels.
Not surprisingly I got very bored with that project (gee, can you tell that I don't like the yarn?) so on the way back (a mere 6 hour trip) I switched to a different project with some yarn I really DO like.This is the beginning of a pair of Whistler Wrist Warmers for a perpetually chilly friend, enabled by my day of hookie at Monarch Knitting on Tuesday, where I bought some Inox 2s and another Japanese brand of 2s which I'd never seen before (I had brought dpns with me, but forgot how much I hated using them).And now, time to go have dinner with my sweetie.
Well okay, after various comments by my friends, seeing that said friends (even the non-techie ones) could do it quite easily without the HTML heavy-lifting from days of yore, and -- yes, I must admit -- a week at this year's Internet Librarian Conference I'm finally giving this a whirl.
What the hell I'll talk about, I dunno.
I must admit however, (knitting geek alert!) that I am eager to finally get my FO photos organized into one aesthetically pleasing journal.
