Sea Anemone Knits

A few weeks ago, my friend Susan sent an email around to a bunch of us in the knitting group asking if any of us wanted to go see the Yarn Harlot magically appear in Austin. I wrote back immediately with a resounding YES!!! Apparently, I was the only one who did that without even checking the calendar. I was just going to make it work and any other plans be damned. As happy luck would have it, I had nothing going on for these dates. By the week before the event, we had managed to gather a group of 6 of us to be representin’ the H-Town. Whoopee!!! Kelly, Jet, Susan, Jennifer and I drove up together and Staci drove up seperately. Have a picture of us sitting in the Church before Stephanie came up to chit chat with everyone. Actually, I’m not in the picture because I was behind the camera!

I had an absolute blast. The Harlot was wonderful! She gave a talk and signed books and she’s so lovely and funny and down to earth. I mean, she’s totally just another knitter, like all of us, but at the same time, she’s a knitting rockstar! We got a group picture (my hair is allllliiiive!!!)

I was a struck by an inability to speak reasonably intelligently when it was my turn to have my book signed. I think I mostly grinned at her. I know I managed to ask her if she would take a picture with my "Mom Sock" to which she kindly obliged.(for my Mom who is in the hospital right now… that was the bitter part of the time in Austin. I immediately hopped in the car and drove down there within 15 minutes of being back in Houston. I’ve spent a lot of time in cars in the last 3 days…)

I didn’t really meet a bunch of new people while I was there but I bonded more with those that I knew. I ran into Christine, which was lovely. She had organized a lunch gathering across the street from Hill Country Weavers at a restaurant called Guero’s. With smiles on their faces, they can handle about a bazillion loud hungry knitters who are high on knitterly energy. Quite fun and I enjoyed the food alot too. Thank you Christine!! I hope she is able to join us on Thursday night soon.

I did get to meet a very lovely knitter named Sarah. I met her because I went over and proceeded to gush a bit about how much I liked the tank she was wearing. It is the Waterlily top from the Spring 06 Interweave Knits. I have some Blue Sky Alpaca Cotton that may have to become this tank in the near future. I am inspired! I then got to talk to her just a tiny bit more at Guero’s. But not as much as I would have liked.

While I was waiting my turn for the book signing, I wandered around amongst other knitters. Some were drinking beer to combat the nasty life-sucking heat. Others were inside marinating in lovely cold air conditioning. Still others were inside HCW shopping and cleaning out the yarn. I bought some lovely things. Spent more than I should have. But how often does one get to meet the Harlot and shop in a new place?? I think every person there can offer the same explanation! My first purchases came before I met Harlot. I cast on a sleeve for the Hourglass Sweater from LMKG on Thursday night at SnB. I wanted something nice and plain to knit on this weekend. I cast it onto a 16" Circular Boye needle. By the time that I sat down to listen to the Harlot, the needle was making this scratchy noise and was no longer knitting smoothly. Jet confirmed this for me and I put it down in disgust because I couldn’t tolerate the scratchy. So my first purchase was a 16" Addi to solve this. Smooth sailing since! I’ll provide pictures soon.

My second purchase included these two things:

The teal wool will be used for my attempt at shibori knitting. I bought a bag of marbles at walmart that I will tie into the finished fabric before I felt it to create the bumpies. The needles are a new set being released by Blue Sky Alpacas and they were most definitely bought while tripping along high as a kite on so much knitterly energy that I apparently didn’t notice the price tag, because WOW. I have knit with them and they are quite lovely. Very smooth and easy to handle. Plus, the tin will hold many more needles than the set of 5 that come in it. I’ve currently got all of my nice birch dpns in there too. The needles will only fit if they are 5" or less though. A requisite kitty shot follows and that will wrap up the post for today as I really really need to go to sleep so I can wake up for work on time. Yikes… I’ll only barely get 6 hours tonight… Oh well! Ciao!

So Kelly and I went to a spinning class this past Saturday. Unfortunately, Kelly got quite ill while we were there and so she drank water and watched. I felt horrible for her feeling so sick. The class itself was ok. It was good for me in that it put everything I’d read on the web into the correct order and cleared up that ‘S’ and ‘Z’ twist deal for me. But other than that, all three of us in the class seemed to have a grasp of it already. We got so far ahead that the lady teaching it joked (quasi-joked. she didn’t seem too thrilled) that we were getting two classes in one and as a result, cheating her out of class fees. I don’t know if anyone else caught it, but it touched a nerve with me. I think this was mainly because she didn’t so much as teach us anything, but just sat there and told us what to do and wow, we knew so much! I could have done this at home with a book and saved money. Also, she had this skein of "yarn" that she had spun herself out of fur that her cat had shed. I declined to touch it at first because it looked like a massive knotty hair ball. But at the end of the class I finally picked it up and yeah, I could have done without that. Curiousity killed the cat so to speak I guess, but it was disgusting. Note to self: Never spin your pet’s shed fur. It will look as gross as it sounds/feels.

I did actually finish a tiny mini skein that fits neatly in the palm of my hand. I was pretty pleased with myself. It’s plied too. She told us how to do an "Andean Ply" which makes no sense now that I’m outside of the class, but worked out pretty well to make 2 ply yarn. I think it’s something that will work best with small amounts of yarn. I spun a little bit on Sunday. But I woke up late and didn’t feel all that wonderful. I am apparently unable to spin thick bulky yarn. I found that I had more luck with spinning yarn that was probably cobweb weight yarn and should I ply it, would possibly be laceweight. Which is funny since I’ve yet to have a successful lace knitting project. What on earth could I do with handspun laceweight?? I suppose I could give it away or something. I don’t know.

We each bought 8oz of uncolored roving to try our hand at dying but we didn’t quite get that far. Soon though. Soon. We have each bought dye so that between us we’ve got a rainbow. I did however manage to buy the wrong dye. I remembered what brand to get, but I didn’t know that Kelly had bought powdered dye and I bought liquid. I looked this up on the company website and sure enough, while the dye I bought would be ok for dying wool, its better suited to that silk screening thing or silk painting. Whatever it’s called. So I’ll go out again and pick up the powdered dye here soon.

Anyway… I’ll post pictures when I get home. Have a lovely rainy day!

So, I went to the Dr yesterday and was throughly violated, but I like my new Doctor. She’s still pretty young, but very disarming and nice. Totally made me feel comfortable about the fact that I let her poke and prod my body about 5 minutes after I first met her. The result of this Dr’s appt meant that I had the rest of the day off to play. Yay!

My first stop after my appt was to mail off my package to my downstream SP and pick up my giftie from my upstream SP.

Monsiuer le Bug inspected the package on arrival to assure that it was not tampered with by my lovely mail person.

Upon opening, I find these!

Bug thinks I’m a spoiled rotten girl. He may be on to something.

Upon closer inspection reading the card I discover that the pretty blue yarn

is some yarn that was handspun by my SP. Am I lucky or what?? If I had spun that, I’d be unwilling to let it go! It’s gorgeous, soft and squooshy; ie: perfect!

She also sent some pretty mystery green wool (I think it’s got a little mohair or perhaps angora in it. I will need to look into this when I get home tonight. And, oh but wait, there’s more! She sent a skein of Cherry Tree Hill sock yarn in the most delicious purple-y green-y colors. The sock yarn children broke down crying last night by the way. They are jealous. They know that Laura’s yarn and this will totally be the next socks to be knit instead of working my way through the sock yarn according to acquisition rank.

And then, I know! More?? Geez. I’m gonna be a total priss after a box of goodies this good!

It’s a new book of baby patterns! Exactly what I needed as I’ve got three babies to knit for! Dark Chocolate (half gone now, by the way!) and last, but most definitely not least, a moose magnet! I love the moose! Moose are so funky looking and funny. I love this magnet!

I can’t even remember what else I did with my afternoon off. It was all eclipsed by my box of surprises! Thank you SP!!!!

I had two visitors this weekend. Terribly excited to see both. As of 8am, this one has left.

The other is more of the permanent houseguest variety. But he’s nice, doesn’t make a mess and I don’t have to explain all of the yarn to him. Could you ask for more? And a picture of my squooshy little man lest you think I may have changed my "single" status.

So, as noted by Kelly, Meredith and Susan on Thursday night, I have indeed broken my $#!+ knitting curse. Heaven shall only ever know what I did to deserve such torture. But I have started an "Oh Woe Is Me" project as a result. This will be my second Anthropologie Inspired Capelet as designed by Julsey from Craftster. I’m feeling sociable, have a picture!

I made this one back in January…

I’m really happy with this first one, but it’s so warm and fuzzy that it will only really work in like cold weather. And I wanted one to wear with tank tops in the summer, so hence the "Woe" project of needing one in a more Summer-In-Texas friendly yarn.

I also got some work done on the blue baby sweater. See? I did work on things that have a deadline!

So Friday night, Meryl and I met up with Kelly and Rob at Aztecas for margaritas. Note: Please never try more than two. These people are not making pansies over there. We saw some guy get sick. I later heard his friends comment on the 4 margaritas and 2 shots. This was not some little guy either. So there’s some proof of the pansy-less-ness of these ‘ritas.

Saturday saw us watching A Scanner Darkly at the Angelika. We both decided that we don’t hate the movie, but we don;t really love it either. I’ve decided that I like it, but don’t particularly enjoy the exploitative-ness of humans without their knowledge going on in the film. Definitely worth seeing though. Afterwards though we felt the need to go to a bookstore and look at books. We marinated in books for 4 hours. Can you imagine anything better?? Nope, me either. Anyway, it’s "Laundry Time" and I must go forth to the laundromat to create some clean clothing to wear to the office. I get the feeling that they don’t appreciate wrinkles and such…

remember that battery issue? yeah, still not a happy camper. only this time I don’t have brownies to drown my sorrow. bugger. that Vicki guy, the one who was so bloody aggrevating and yet slightly less helpful than he ought to have been, did he call me back? NO! a resounding pissy NO.

on top of all of this, I have ^#$%ed up so much knitting that I am almost tempted to pick up my cross stitch again. (it’s been about 6 years since I touched it) Let’s go through the list of things that turned to $#!+ the nanosecond I touched them.

• Grannie Smith Sweater Swatch - four tries to swatch the dagged thing. SWATCH. That’s it. I just want the gauge. Why is that so wrong??
• Pink Baby Sweater - I knit the back. I knit a sleeve. I knit both front pieces. Laid them out to see how they’d fit together. Scratched my head for about five minutes wondering why I had a funny feeling about the sweater. Then the lightbulb that says "::poink poink:: you idiot, you knit both the fronts 3 inches too short."
• Koigu Sock - Just a plain koigu sock. Trying to de-stash. Making a good will effort towards the yarn kiddies hanging around the house grumbling about neglect. I knit the toe of the sock. I got pretty excited about the idea of this sock. Had to start the whole thing over when  Igot a little too excited and knit a toe that would have been more at home on the foot of the Jolly Green Giant. Redo toe and think to myself, "Self, this sock would look mighty fine with a handful of small cables running up the front." Well, note to self. "Self, screw the cables. I’m sorry I mentioned them." I have frogged the mighty fine handful of small cables oh, about twice now and reknit probably 4 inches of sock once to discover not just one, but multiple dropped stitches from undoing the cables and missing a stitch and then there’s not enough leeway in the yarn to ladder them back up.
• Warshrag from MDK - I need to just throw in the towel on this one. If I had a dishtowel to throw in! Why else would I be trying to knit one? I keep putting it down mid-row to answer the phone, take the pizza out of the oven, etc only to pick it back up and proceed to do something wrong.

Am I just cursed?? What can I do to break this streak????

I’ve been waiting patiently for my laptop’s battery to recharge. I’ve been waiting for three whole days. This laptop is 3 months old. That’s it. WTF, mate, WTF? I got on the phone with tech support last night and talked with a guy named Vicki while I’m pretty sure was Indian (India Indian, not Native American) and we stumbled around trying to fix this without relaly knowing what each other was saying. Very nice guy. Loaded some newer version of a "BIOS" on my computer. Whatever that is, it was supposed to fix my battery problem. Yeah, not so much. So, he is going to be calling me probably tomorrow to check up on the battery situation and I’ll be able to tell him that it’s not working out. Which means they may end up having to replace my battery. Arg.

Knitting wise, I wish I had pictures for you and I do, but not on my computer yet. Why, you may ask? Because I’m a lazy bum. They’re not even all that impressive either. On the baby sweaters and this Knitting World Cup, I’ve represented America well. I followed in their footsteps. I lost. But I’m baking brownies with cinnamon. So I win! On the sweaters, I’ve got two backs, one and a half pieces of three total front pieces and no sleeves. So I have one and a half front pieces and two sleeves to go. That’s not too bad considering both babies are due in September. Right??

I also started swatching for my Mom’s Grannie Smith Cardigan. Did I tell y’all what she did? She saw the cardigan on here and liked it so much she went out and bought the pattern. She actually searched and bargain shopped the kidsilk haze (and got a killer deal. She bought at $10/ball. I’ve seen it as high at $15. Way to go Mom!) and bought the amount needed + one extra and get this. She’s not a knitter. So she emails me to tell me that I need to go buy the yarn for her and gives me all her info and tells me that I will need to knit this up for her and does she need to get anything else for me to make the sweater besides buttons. The woman has got cojones. I don’t know any knitter whose family actually tells them to knit something up for them. Asks them to, yes. Tells them to? No. Cojones. So what do I do? Do I retrain her and instruct her in the art of wheedling a knitter into knitting for her? Nope. I email her back to let her know that I"ll start the sweater as soon as I finish the baby sweaters.

But I’m baking! I have completed cinnamon brownies. Very yummy. I swear I’ll post pictures soon. How about I leave you with a joke instead!

What lies on the ocean and twitches?

I have 8 days left. I’ve got 2 sweater backs finished. I have 3 sweater fronts and two sleeves to go. Can I do it??? I took pictures just now and when I’m home and can dock my camera to load the pictures, I will edit this to post them. Stay tuned!