It's a small world after all...

No need to thank me for getting that song in your head now. Here's a fix: "Yellow Submarine."

So I was bumming around on the internet the other day and looking for some new knitting blogs to read. There are a couple ways I can do that; one of them is looking at the sidebars of other blogs I currently read. Anyways, I was reading Jessimuhka Knits because I know the aforementioned Jessimuhka from a LiveJournal community we both frequent. So I was looking at her blogroll, and I see that she is friends with someone whose name looks a little familiar. Long story short, it happens to be my cousin P.'s wife, C., and she and Jessimuhka hang out in a knitting group together. In San Diego. (I haven't seen either C. or P. since my grandma's birthday in 2004, and I've heard news from them only slightly more frequently.)

So. I log on to Ravelry and see that C. is on there too, so I send her a message. She is surprised but happy to hear from me. She says she won't have much time to knit for a while, though, as she and P. are expecting a baby girl. Next week.

Huh.

So that makes [counts on fingers...] four baby sweaters I need by next Monday.

****
I ripped out my Sidewinders on my third attempt because the increases looked so incredibly awful. The instructions said to use a bar increase, whereas I always just increase with a kfb or pfb for everything, but the bar increase left giant holes. I wouldn't have minded quite so much (hey, at least they look vaguely intentional if they're symmetrical) except that the decreases on the other side of the toe REALLY made it look wonky. Back to the ballwinder it went.

(The intended recipient ended up having her surgery and doing just fine, so that's good news.)

I knit furiously on Violets by the River while sitting through two quarters of putrid football at a sports bar last Saturday when I should have been studying for a midterm. (I think the ferocity came from the need to escape brain freeze. I'd like to take this opportunity to mention that I also successfully broke up my Sunday study session by mentioning my plan to use yarn in the corn maze next week.) Just a couple more quick iterations of the main motif across the top and I'll switch the the Feather and Fan along the edges. I'll have to pin it out a bit first, though, to see if it merits a slightly larger adaptation.

Started in on Shedir for myself in a dusky green Berroco Ultra Alpaca because I need a winter hat and, well, I felt like knitting last night but was too lazy to go out to get Violets out of the car :P

My laziness knows no bounds.

Good gracious.

Don't you hate it when you get into The Zone and then, just as suddenly... you're not?

It's definitely been like that here at Chez Mads. When i get in stressful/heavily scheduled times, or when I'm really churning away at something, things are much better. Recently, though, I've hit some stupid mental snags that have left me sitting at home thinking, "Geez, shouldn't I be knitting SOMETHING tonight???"

Mystery Stole

The Mystery Stole was going really well. I was pretty much on pace with the new clues, so that was exciting and kept me motivated to keep plugging away at every spare moment. Hell, my bus ride is usually only 7 minutes long, and I was bringing the stole along so I could get in two good rows during that short time. Plus I had some choir rehearsals, and the knitting was perfect for breaks -- get some stuff done, get people oohing and ahhing over it ("Oh... it's nothing..."), have an activity that keeps you from getting super chatty and tiring your voice out (this was especially important with a group where we rehearsed for 10 hours over one weekend... owww...).

Then Clue 5 came up. For those of you who haven't followed the Mystery Stole, it was a lovely lacy thing which at that point had had a sort of "cat's paw" pattern for a good hundred rows or something. Very abruptly, we were to switch over from a standard rectangular stole to... a wing. It's not as weird as it sounds; in fact, once the designer had shown off a schematic, I thought that it would work out great.

Unfortunately, I'm using Lacey Lamb, aka World's Most Teensiest Yarn Evarr. Therefore, I need to add a repeat of the cat's paw section, which means 100 more rows of what is basically a three-row repeat. Pretty easy, but more importantly it will take me off the pace. that has been a HUGE motivating factor for me. Needless to say, I have now given it a breather.

Adding to that is the fact that so many people like the wing idea that the designer is now coming up with a two-wing pattern. So, as stated above, I was ready to do the asymmetrical stole as written, but the idea of the double winged stole appeals to me a lot, so I haven't yet decided whether I will go back on my plan and do the symmetrical Mystery Stole thing followed by the symmetrical wings.

Le sigh.

Mermaid's Hair

I finally just bit the bullet and bought a new copy of the pattern at Sow's Ear. of course, three days after that, my mom found the old copy while cleaning out her house. Of course.

I've been trying to pound out some more of that, but the allover samness of the pattern (and the comparative roughness of the wool -- at least compared to Lacey Lamb et. al.) isn't really reeling me in. But... again, plugging away.

Sidewinders

My friend's mom is going in for a little surgery that may or may not turn out to be rather traumatic. I've been itching to try the Sidewinder pattern, so I thought I'd knit her some socks. No idea what colors she likes -- she's a bit conservative in her dress -- but I mused for a while and came up with a gorgeous semi-solid blue and purple skein of Mountain Colors Bearfoot.

This mom is a knitter as well, and while I was hanging out with her and her offspring last weekend, we stopped by my favorite yarn store in her neck of the woods. She was oohing and ahhing over everything, and as we meandered back towards the sock yarn I asked her, very casually, what colors she liked. "Oh, I like, all sorts... gold, blue, pink, you name it," she said. I was feeling pretty good about my selection until she finished by noting that "the only color I really DON'T care for is purple. I don't know why; I just can't stand any sort of purple."

Drat.

Better buy more sock yarn!

At any rate, I picked up a lovely soft green trekking with hints of pink here and there (Leems, I think you've used this in a baby sweater before...?). I'm about 14 rows into the Sidewinder, and I'm very interested to see how it turns out. It's pretty good so far.

The mom is going in for her surgery tomorrow, and god knows I have no idea when the socks will be done. We share a shoe size...

At any rate, please think good thoughts for her. (Okay, and for the success of my knitting, too, whether or not it makes it up to her eventually :P)

Other projects

DUDE I AM NOT ALLOWED TO START ANYTHING ELSE OKAY???

Teardrop Scarf from the most recent Knitscene was earmarked for a leftover skein of red Lacey Lamb, but I ended up giving that to TChemGrrl for our exciting Infernal Design project (designing knitting inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy and other medieval literature). Lemur had clued me in that Borealis was selling some great yarn with great yardage, and I was so tickled when I saw it -- Jojoland Harmony, with yardage comparable to Lacey Lamb but with soft, GORGEOUS Noroesque color changes. LOVE IT.

I was doing really well on the whole "yarn diet, no new laceweight, no new blue/green yarn" thing. Until the last two weekends :P

Side note for locals or those passing through:

Sow's Ear, under new management, has made some really exciting changes. They've added food from the Willy st. Co-op (y0m), expanded the store through the back wall -- a small change, given that they had the back room, but what flow! -- and OH MY LORD, the have Fleece Artist/Handmaiden. Ohhhhhhh. Thank heavens the Sea Silk skeins only have 440 yards, or I would be very poor indeed. My pal Froggy and I basically stood there for a good 15 minutes straight just so we could hold it and stroke it and love it while chatting. Also of note: Claudia Handpainted, especially in softer shades and some gorgeous tone-on-tone colorways. Heavens, how lovely!

I had no clue!

(First off, hello to any Ravelry-ites out there!)

I was vaguely aware of the existence of this so-called Sidewinder sock, but given that I am not currently a Sock Person (hate wearing them, hate tiny DPN-ness and stopping to slide my stitches around on dpns or long circs) I must have dismissed it as just another sock pattern I'd avoid.

Well, today I happened to catch a picture of it on V's blog, and WOW! How cool is that? Looks like magic! Screw the fact that it requires grafting up the whole front -- I LIKE grafting. (Makes me feel smart, yo.) And now I can go out and actually use all of those awesome colors of Koigu and Gems and Trekking and Cherry Tree Hill and Mountain Colors and and and...

Okay, back up. Not allowed to start anything new until I finish something else.

My current Something Else, of course, is the Mystery Stole. It's smaller than expected, given the use of Lacey Lamb (teeniest yarn evarr), but I think that if I add a repeat or two of section 4 or whatever the repeatable section is, it'll still be nice and long and lovely.

It's purple, you know, the result of a little trip to Arcadia Knitting courtesy my pal Brian while I was in Chicago a couple weeks ago. A nice deep eggplant color. NOT BLUE. NOT GREEN. See? I told you I could stop whenever I liked.

The only thing about the Mystery Stole is that I have this feverish need to complete it by the time the next clue comes out, and I really need to be easier on myself. My summer is going pretty well, and I've had some great times in the evenings, doing stuff like playing timpani in the community summer band, an upcoming choir concert, going to a baseball game, etc. Knitting, especially knitting a wee little project with help from a two-sided chart, isn't always compatible with those things. There's been a fair amount of traveling, and I am usually in the passenger seat, so I've gotten a goodly amount done during those times. This weekend should lead to some more of that.

Also, the Mystery Stole has really brought to my attention how we don't always realize the wonderful things we're doing. I was accosted at the Sow's Ear last week by an older and obviously more experienced knitter who couldn't stop raving about the stole. It's really a beautiful pattern. I find, though, that I'm constantly being self-deprecating about it: "Oh, it's just following a chart." "Oh, yeah, the yarn and the needles are tiny, but it's really no different than using worsted; the stitches are the same." Well, judging by the amount of teeth-gnashing I do when I have to fix something (especially when I drop a damn stitch... LORD I could live without that...), it's not. Doing this is a great test of patience, and that's something that a lot of people can't do. Who knows; maybe I'm in that number.

Sometimes the "craft" makes you overlook the "art". That's a mistake.