Babies, Babies, Part II

H's shower is Sunday. I finished the baby sweater for her:
and a baby hat: I have one and a half booties done. This is the one. Not the half. I love both the hat and the sweater, but I don't love the booties. I think I am going to see if I can find a different pattern to make for her. I used Lion Brand's Baby's First and although the yarn splits sometimes, in general, I really liked working with it. It's part acrylic and part cotton, totally machine-washable, and it's bulky, so it knits up quickly. I think I must knit really tightly, because I knit the sweater on size 10s, which it calls for when you use dk or light worsted yarn, and this is definitely bulky. I wish I didn't knit so tightly because I like the way things look when the knit is smaller.

Overpackaging, anyone?

And we wonder why we have so much landfill. I bought these big balls of yarn at Amazing Savings a few weeks ago. The yarn is very much like the old "Trellis" which I think has been discontinued, but which I loved using for a shawl. So when I saw these, I pounced on them. I was thinking "320 yards isn't *that* much - there must be something in the middle." Oh, was I right. There was a HUGE styrofoam ball in the middle. These pictures are in reverse order and I can't seem to get them flipped around right now, but what you have (bottom to top) is 1) the box of yarn, 2) the big styrofoam ball from the middle, 3) the wound ball of yarn and 4) the wound ball of yarn next to the original box.

Argh. If I didn't love this yarn so much and if it were still available from whatever company made Trellis, I would have returned these all right away. But I'll still be annoyed by it...

Babies, Babies, Babies

So two of my friends are having babies. I wasn't really expecting baby showers. One is Jewish, and Jews don't traditionally do baby showers (I was especially surprised because L is particularly superstitious, but I guess gifts trump superstition for her), and H lives abroad and I figured she wouldn't be able to come back for a shower. Wrong on both accounts. So one is June 19 and one is June 27. I'm making the Cotton Candy Jacket from the Better Homes and Gardens Hip Knits book because it is the easiest sweater ever. And it's downright adorable. It's all made in one piece and then you just seam up the sides. I do think that the arms need to be a little longer than they call for in the pattern, and the hood needs to be much smaller. So I'll modify. But the good thing is that I'm almost done with the first sweater. I just have to make myself finish it before I start the second one, because I'm really ready to be done with the first.

Someday, I'll think about these things in advance and have lots of baby sweaters made ahead of time like most smart people do...

This is the sweater:

And this is the close up of the super-cute button:

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.