Knitting kangaroos!

Okay, this is just so darn cute!

And now, back to the Moguls scarf. And Nature Cardigan Redux.

Terror and Joy

Terror: Must knit, knit, knit, knit, knit...until my fingers fall off or Xmas arrives, whatever happens first.

Have to finish the Moguls scarf for my 6' tall nephew, and the Nature Cotton cardigan for my great-nephew. The Moguls design calls for 360 sts/row @ 6 rows/stripe & 12 stripes. My mind balks at doing the math, even allowing for my arbitrary truncation to 310 sts/row (62" vs. 72" is perfectly acceptable in my mind).

So I am trying to turn this
into a completed version of this:
which right now does look rather like a demented, mutant ruffle, but holds the promise of actually being kinda cool, and semi-reversible. It is, sadly, a wee bit too unwieldy (as well as heavy) to wrangle during a morning subway commute. Thank GAWD that my office will be closing early this Friday. 8-1/2 stripes down, 3-1/2 left to go. Ack.

Oh yeah, Plymouth Encore Worsted on 9s.

And I am working on a variation of a previous Nature Cotton cardigan
I made for a friend's baby (still in use! yes!!) and adapting it for my great-nephew. Considering the gauge, it is just whipping along. I started this week, and have so far finished both front panels, and 1-1/2 sleeves.

Joy: Blogger is finally out of beta and now works in Firefox!

Detour in Yarntopia

From the stash:
2 lovely skeins of Lamb's Pride Worsted in Old Sage

Proposed project:
Double-knitted Xmas scarf for my nephew using a Knitpicks pattern from their aptly named Gift List Scarves booklet of 15 free designs, specifically, the Moguls Scarf

Verdict:
He would prefer another color. Oy.

Alternatives:
Well, I have lots of nice navy blue Puno alpaca from the Riot but nothing appropriate in the same gauge (20 sts) for the contrasting color. Also from the Riot, a bag of beautiful burgundy Reynolds Lopi (14 sts) but with the same problem re: contrasting color. Or...(whatever it is, see: lack of contrasting yarn, above)

And people wonder why I still wind up buying more yarn despite my insanely large stash.

To the left,
I have just 4 words to describe my fiendish plot for a friend:
Cincinnati Bengals jester hat!

To the right:
my completed Xmas scarf for my niece Kim being blocked, which used Rowan Polar in Silver Lining on 15s (hey, I knit really tight, okay?) Selected from my stash! hooray! and approved by Kim! Double yay!

Rudy & friends

They did it again!! The Bears took the Rams' kick return (did I use the correct term?) and scored a TOUCHDOWN! What the...?!? And apparently the defensemen have all left for the evening, as there is still 4:41 left in the 4th quarter and the score is 42 - 27. What the...?! It's almost like the scores for some Knicks games!


Coincidentally, I seem to have made football food for our Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer viewing. (Yes, Rudy & Herbie & Santa -- no, not Rudy the Sean Astin football movie.) Hmmmm...

Thanks to one of Paula Deen's sons, we had bacon-wrapped breadsticks dredged in parmesan (right) where the breadsticks did a fine, fine job of soaking up essence de oink-oink, and the ever-classic pig(let)s in blankets (above, top/left), rounded out with chicken wings a la Good Season (a last minute, panic-stricken inspiration when Fresh Direct forgot to pack the marinade). I also made apple cider and Alton Brown's recipe for fresh eggnog, and miraculously managed not to give anyone food poisoning (raw eggs, pork, chicken...so many ways to Go Wrong, bacteriologically speaking).

We rounded our evening of heckling (Santa and Donner are jerks! which won't stop me from watching again next year) and gawking (does Frosty need special ed or what?) with a "very special visit" to the world of the Star Wars Holiday Special. Oh. My. God. It does not improve upon repeat viewing. My friend Sam brought it and he and another friend were both curious so the rest of us humored them.

As my discerning sweetie said, "Even when I was 5, I knew it was a piece of crap." It's so bad that even George Lucas wants to hide it under a rock, though I do admire an IMDBer's exhortation to "in the name of all that is holy please watch this pile of crap!" My advice, however, is to watch it only in the company of like-minded friends and with large quantities of alcohol (or knitting) to deaden the pain.

I choose to believe that my laptop exerted executive privilege when it refused to play the rest of the movie after an hour...which felt like 8 hours...but was actually about 37 minutes before it ended, according to IMDB. So although we got to watch the oddly pornographic wookie dream sequence (eeeeeeewwww...) with Diahann Carroll, we did not make it to the bit where Carrie FIsher sings some Life Day ditty.

Sam, however, owes my boyfriend BIG TIME, as watching the whole thing (again) was like fingernails on a chalkboard for him. So Sam -- who does not follow football at all -- will find that he will be watching the Super Bowl with us. Heh!

A lid, a li-wu, and a lotta fluffy yarn

So I unadopted and rolled back to Firefox 1.5.0.8 but it doesn't seem to have made a difference: I still can't log in to Blogger Beta. Dammit. I am stuck with Internet Exploder 6.0 apparently. Grrrr....

On the bright side, I...um...went back to the Yarn Riot and bought some more of that nice rose-colored Wool-ease (in case I had the urge to double the yarn, that would only bring the ENTIRE cost of the sweater up to a whopping $32), and another bag of the turquoise-multi Bernat Sox (Hippi Hot, $10 for 10 sk) for my mom, as she has been eyeing my Cervinia Calzetteria from last year's Riot, and I know I will not be wanting to give up MY bag of Sox.
Believe it or not, I did actually manage to finish a project in the midst of this orgy of yarn buying. What my sweetie jokingly calls a lid -- finished in the nick of time, considering the beginning of true winter weather is about to make itself felt -- is made from a ball of Lion Brand Wool-ease Thick & Quick which I unwisely bought years ago. You can't really see the seed stitch around the brim, even if you click to enlarge the pic, and you will mercifully probably never see the pompom I was contemplating adding from the scrap yarn.
I had also made about a foot of progress on my niece's Xmas present, using the Berroco Air, Caribbean Scarf pattern, when I decided I didn't like the pattern...(You can swatch for gauge, but not for design, and if unless someone else can think of a way to do THAT, I'd love to hear it.)
So I ripped out the entire thing (ribbit...) and instead replaced it with a design of my own combining seed stitch and and "relief" pattern of a diamond. (Click on the photo to see an enormous enlargement...) You do not want to KNOW how many times I ripped this scarf out before I gave up and stuck with this pattern on the right.

Oh, and "liwu" means gift in Mandarin Chinese.

RIP, P and S

Well, 'tis a sad, sad day, but after years of ominous mutterings, P-and-S Yarns is finally closing. Their building has been sold, and their mailing was a bit ambiguous in terms of possible relocation, but considering the price of Manhattan real estate, I'm dubious.

My co-worker went Thursday night, the first night of the customer liquidation "pre-sale" and reported that it was INSANELY crowded. You would have thought it was a free toilet paper giveaway in the Soviet Union. All that craziness for (drumroll, please) 10% off. Sheesh. Glad I missed it.

Considering today's yucky weather and the lame discount, my mom and I decided to skip it. I am tempted, however, (assuming my neck isn't doing a pretzel imitation) to lure my mom to the last day of Smiley's Yarn Riot on Saturday. Even SHE admitted 10 balls of superwash for $10 was a deal.

In the meantime, I am severely peeved at Blogger Beta, since they seem to have killed off the option to FORMAT my postings in IE and Firefox still gives a 502 error (which they acknowledge on their homepage -- yes, the problem is THAT bad). In addition, now I cannot use ampersands (WTF?!) in my posts. There's supposed to be a scheduled outage Saturday which will theoretically fix the 502 error. We'll see.

And now, to soothe myself, I think I will go start on my niece's Xmas present (the now sadly discontinued Rowan Polar in 646:Silver Lining, knitted up in Berroco's Caribbean Scarf pattern). I'd started it last night at my mom's but ripped it all out as we decided that I needed to use 15s (!) instead of 13s. Their pattern calls for using 2 contrasting colors, but I don't see why I can't use a single color instead. (Oooooh...I used a double negative, a grammatical no-no I still remember being scolded for in the third grade. Oh well.)