In October of 2008, I made the following knitting resolutions:

1. Make at least one charity project per month. This can be as small as a chemo hat or a square for a blanket that will be joined together by others.
2. Work down the stash before buying new yarn. I know that this is is a pipe dream, but i am going to make an effort not to just keep buying yarn. S o I am going to try to make at least two projects for any one project's worth of yarn that I buy.
3. Make scrapghans out of whatever leftovers I have that aren't really enough for anything else.
4. Finish UFOs.

So let's see. I have not really made one charity project per month. But I have made about 30 granny squares, and they are all going to other people, so I think that sort of counts. Not *really* but sort of. I have, been generally pretty good about working down the stash. Not amazing - not by any stretch of the imagination, but pretty good. I've definitely gotten rid of a lot of the stash by knitting it up and some by sending it off to other people. Scrapghans. Hmmm.. well, not so much, but again, granny squares. All in all, I'm using up yarn. And as for the UFOs, I ripped a few, and finished a few, and have a few left.

Final tally: I haven't *quite* lived up to my resolutions, but I'm not doing *horribly* with them, either. Making a few blankets for C's knitting group should help get rid of some of the stash, too.

Striped Ice Cream

When I was a kid, I read a book called Striped Ice Cream by Joan M. Lexau. I loved the book. It was sweet, and had lovely life lessons, and family members who truly looked out for one another.

Fast forward about 25 years, and my friend C is making blankets with her knitting group to be donated to newborns. I pulled out some red heart baby clouds in pink, light purple and the ever-so-faintest of light blues. I started doing two lines of each, rotating right around, blue, purple, pink, blue, purple, pink, and lo and behold, what I came up with was striped ice cream. Or, well, striped cotton candy is what I really think it looks like. Did 78 lines, then edged the whole thing in the pink. I love it. I want to give it to C., but I may wait to find out if either of my two pregnant friends are having girls... Or I may just make another.

Unfinished Projects

I had an unfinished project. I don't know when I bought the yarn. I don't know when I started the project. I think it was for me, but I can't be sure about that. It was a Sunday Market Shawl, in a deep purple. Different from the one I made for my friend L., but also purple. About two weeks ago, I found it, and decided to finish it rather than frogging it. It took a while, because I had it on size five needles, but last night, I finally finished it. Yay! I do have a bit of the yarn left, and it will be fun to find some things to do with the rest of it. I suppose this counts toward my stash knit-down because it was definitely yarn in my stash. I think it's a bad sign if you don't know where yarn came from or when you bought it. It's like yarn insomnia. Not a good sign. Just glad to be done with it.

Granny Squares

Confession: I hate Granny Squares. I think they're ugly as sin.

However, I have been in stash-busting mode for a while now, and am trying to get rid of as much yarn as humanly possible without just sending it all to people (although I am doing a bit of that, too). To this end, on Ravelry, I joined a "Friendship Square Exchange" in which people trade 6" squares. I don't want any, I just want to be able to send them to people. So I contacted the moderator, and she said she would keep me as an "angel" which I guess is just kind of what you have when someone doesn't get whatever it is they are supposed to get in their swap. To be on "angel" status, I told her I would commit to one square a month, and would go from there. I was just going to make one straight-across six inch square, but I thought, "hmmm, let me see if I can make a granny square because then I know it will be 6x6 rather than 6x6.5 or 5.5x6 which is what usually happens when I try to make squares. So I tried it.

And O.M.G. Granny squares are SO MUCH FUN!!!! I made 20 of them this weekend. I blew through a bunch of my smaller balls of scrap yarn. I did different combinations. I did solid squares, squares of variegated yarns, squares of two or more yarns. I have ones that look like flowers because of their colors, and ones that are color-coordinated with others. I have ones that are so ugly that I cannot stand to look at them. I have five made out of the Lion Brand Imagine in a sea green that I think would work well as four corners and a middle of a blanket. As soon as I take pictures, I am going to post them and figure out how to get them to the best homes possible.

I still hate Granny Squares. I still think they're ugly as sin. But I LOOOOOOOVE making them.

Just One More Row

I found this site:

Waaay down at the bottom is the "Progressive Procrastinations of a Knitter."

http://anacleta.homestead.com/knittinghumor.html

It is so me. When I was a kid, I used to do this with reading. My father would come in and tell me to turn out the light. I would say, "I just want to finish my chapter." He would make me show him how much I had left, and he would say, "Okay, I'll be back in a little bit." I would read voraciously until he returned, and would make sure I was into the middle of the next chapter. He would say, "Time to turn out the lights" and I would say, "Oh, but look, I just have a few pages left until the end of the chapter." I cannot even imagine how many extra hours of reading I scammed in this fashion while I was a kid. Now that I'm an adult, I have to be the bad guy myself. If I don't have work the next day, I have been known to stay up until 3 or 4 to finish a book. I'm not always such a good bad guy.

And yeah. Now I do it with knitting, too.

Frogs on His Nose

Passover is rapidly approaching. One of the parts of the story we tell on this holiday recounts the 10 plagues that God sent to entice Pharaoh into letting the Israelites leave Egypt. They are (funny, in my head, I can recite them in Hebrew, but for the English, I have to go look them up):

1. Blood
2. Frogs
3. Lice
4. Flies
5. Cattle Disease
6. Boils
7. Hail
8. Locusts
9. Darkness
10. Death of the Firstborn

It's not so much fun to sing songs about cattle disease or boils, maybe, but there's a really cute song we always sang as kids. It goes, "One day King Pharaoh awoke in his bed/there were frogs in his bed/there were frogs on his head/Frogs on his nose and frogs on his toes/Frogs here/Frogs there/Frogs were jumping everywhere."

Yeah. Sometimes I think we might be mildly ill, you know, as a people. But for my seder (the dinner and telling of the story) I wanted to make a couple of frogs. I decided to make them Amigurumi. I made one, but he looks a little funny. I'll take some pictures of him this weekend. He didn't come out as cute as Ralph the Octopus, but maybe I'll feel differently about him once he's completely finished.

And, no. I'm not knitting hail with which to pelt my guests...

Multi-Tasking

Things I can do while knitting:

1. Talk on the phone
2. Watch TV
3. Carry on a conversation at a cafe
4. Listen to music
5. Enjoy live sporting events
6. Ride in/on trains, planes or automobiles

A new thing I have discovered (in addition to the existing list) I cannot do while knitting:

1. Eat sunflower seeds with the shells on.

Again, lesson learned.

Blocking Lace

I've been reading all of these posts on Ravelry about how important it is to block lace, and how it really makes the pattern what it is supposed to be. Which leads me to a few dilemmas. First, I'm making this Easy Lace Stashbuster Scarf out of brushed acrylic. I know that acrylic doesn't really "block" but I don't know if this would be any different. So I don't know if it would work at all. I should just do a swatch and try to block it, but the lana polo that I'm using does not rip well at all -- it becomes tangled in itself and I just have to throw it away. I know that if I do that, I would wind up throwing away the swatch because there would be nothing else that could be done with it. Second, if it does work, I have no idea how long to make the scarf pre-blocking. I have trouble determining how long a scarf should be to begin with, before you throw this blocking stuff into the mix. Someday, when I can afford nice, natural fibers, I'll be better able to predict stuff like this.

I am NOT a Morning Person

Case in point. Last evening, I cast on the Easy Lace Stashbuster Scarf. I worked on it through a few television shows, and got about a foot into it. I was good, and at about 12:30, turned off the TV, and actually got into bed. If I had my druthers (such a strange word - dictionary.com tells me that it comes from the combination of "I'd" and "rather" - who knew!) I would stay up all night knitting until 5 or 6 am, and then sleep until noon. This is not limited to knitting. It is also my favorite way to read, clean, or do any number of other projects. I am, and have always been, an "owl" when it comes to circadian rhythms. I am not, however, a lark, never have been, never will be. In fact, after my shower, I like to crawl back into bed for a 15 or 20 minute "post-shower nap." This morning, however, I decided to do just a few rows on my scarf instead of indulging in the nap. Boy was this a mistake. I did a row, and then had to tink it back because I only had 19 stitches in between my garter border instead of 20. I think I did this three times before tinking back the row below and realizing where I had messed it up. Then I did a few more rows, and somehow wound up with 17 stitches. I had to tink back once again -- this time a few rows. Let me just share: mohair (or acrylic's mohair equivalent) does *not* tink well.

Lesson learned. Tonight, I knit. Tomorrow morning, I nap.

Under the Gun

Why must I always wait until too close to my deadline to start any given project? I have a party coming up on the 13th. Less than 2 weeks away. Have I known about this party long? Only, oh, since about the middle of January. Why did I not start on something to give the birthday girl before now? No answer to that. No reason. No valid reason, at least. I think I just wasn't thinking about it.

I figure, though, that I do have nearly 2 weeks, and I might be able to finish a nice lace scarf for H, my birthday girl. I am going to attempt this: http://hockeymomknits-donna.blogspot.com/2007/08/easy-lace-stashbuster-scarf.html -- I think it is beautiful, it looks fairly easy, as I do not have a lot of experience with lace, and it was made for a "fuzzy sport weight acrylic" which is exactly the yarn I have for it. So I hope I can do it, I hope I can get it done, and I hope she likes it. It's a friend from London, so I hope a hand-made gift looks charming and thoughtful, instead of cheap.

This is the scarf in progress: