Checking in from New England

Wow, Maine is absolutely amazing! I'm staying on a small island off Portland with my boyfriend's grandmother.  I seriously want to live in Portland some day, and the view from the island is beautiful.

And, the house I'm staying at is also beautiful.  The bathroom that I use at night should be on Pinterest.

I've done some knitting, mostly on the ride up - which was hot and muggy (the car had no AC) and I'm almost done with the leg of my dragonfly socks... but I hit another snag.

The yarn turned my sweaty fingers slightly green!

Okay, looking at the picture, it's really hard to see.  Maybe the heat and sun caused me to hallucinate.

Anyway, the internet in the hotel we're staying at now is really crummy, I'll post a big picdump later this week!

Yarn Winding Nightmare

First, let me say that my birthday on Wednesday was okay - definitely not as bad as last year, alone in NH, but the fact that my family is currently a confusing mess of people ostracizing other people complicated things.  I almost wish I had gone out of town to avoid the guilt storm that followed yesterday.  "You went out with THEM? Instead of ME?"  You get the idea.

On another note, I'm going to Maine! I'm really pumped, and I figured that my current WIPs (besides CC, who is still waiting for her pattern to appear again) are pretty concentration-intensive, so I've decided to work on a pair of socks for myself (again)!

The pattern is going to be Dragonfly Socks, which I found through a KAL that Dee is hosting on her blog.  The yarn is going to be this:

Eskimimi Knits Brocoli Sockoli.  I LOVE the color of this yarn, and it was really the first indie yarn I ever bought because of the color.

But, winding it... what a nightmare! I don't have a swift anymore - I was only borrowing the one at school from Ash - so I tried various techniques to wind the hank.  Eventually all I got was this:

Which took me two hours to detangle.

And then, of course, the skein was funny looking so I had to rewind it again, when this happened.

By that time it was late at night, and I could only react by sobbing and going to bed.

This morning I re-wound the mess twice and finally settled for this.  I don't like that there's such a large difference in height between the outside of the skein and the inside, but look - here's the culprit.

 

The skein is 100g of sock yarn - twice the normal amount.  If I had just wound the hank into two balls, everything would have been fine.  This is pretty much how my 22nd year of life has been so far.

DAL Summer 2012 Submission!

I have been wracking my brain to think of something for this round of Design Along - it seemed like I had a mental block all month about it, but I sat down today and sketched out all my ideas.  I narrowed it down to three that I really liked:

• A Pandora's box shawlette, with different lace panels representing the different things that Pandora let out into the world - skulls for death, boil-like bobbles, dropped stitches, etc.  I realized that this is a cool and kind of dark idea, but I would never have the time to execute it.  And, who am I kidding? I don't wear any of the shawlettes that I've made.
• A set of fingerless gloves based on Adam and Eve, in a leaf lace pattern that wrapped around the wrist and buttoned up the side. While this would be cool, there's not exactly a shortage of leaf lace fingerless gloves in the world.  I didn't think I was going to bring anything new to that arena.
• Finally, this:

 

It's a set of fingerless gloves based on the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur.  The princess Ariadne gave him a thread to find his way out of the labyrinth, and these gloves have embroidery detail that wraps around the hands in patterns as intricate as the person wants.

Yeah, it's a little simple, but it's different and do-able and I'm going to find the perfect yarn this week and the finished project is going to be pretty, just you wait and see!

Sweater Quandry

I took my giant red sweater to a baseball game yesterday with my cousin and my uncle because, frankly, CC (my final nickname for this thing) and I are pretty good friends right now.  I was worried that the 1x1 ribbing on the collar would be time consuming, but 4 inches in and it's really just potato chip knitting, as Kathy would say!

But, I woke up this morning and realized...

... I don't know where the written pattern is.

I looked all through my bag, tore apart my mom's guest room, frantically texted the people whose living rooms I've been squatting in sporadically.  It was all to no avail! I went through every book that I had used, in case it slipped into the pages or got mixed up with the mountains of printed articles that I've been carrying around. Nothing.

What's the most annoying is that I clearly remember the last time I had the pattern.  Someone asked me what I was knitting, and I was sitting on a couch and I said "A shrug, here, it will look like this at the end."  I then unfolded the pattern with gusto and showed them the faded picture.  They looked at me as if I was insane.

If only I could remember when and where that happened!  I think I might just finish the sweater from memory.  Once the collar is long enough, I just have to graft the sides of the shrug together and then pick up stitches for the arms...

Or, CC and I can take a break until the piece of paper shows up? I'm sure that it's somewhere, and I will probably find it between someone's couch cushions or under the seat of my Dad's car.

Notice Anything?

I finally finished the gigantic swatch of stockinette stitch that is the cozy cocoon shrug.  Now, I've picked up the 288 stitches of the edging and am working them in K1P1 rib for 4(ish?) inches.

I actually really like this project.  It's strange, because even a year ago I would have looked at this project and scoffed.  "Too much boring stockinette.  And then, you get to do ribbing? For FOUR INCHES? Ugh."

But between working, fixing up my Dad's house, doing research for my graduate project, and fluttering from place to place as only someone that doesn't have an apartment can... I actually welcomed the endless stockinette stitch.  I worked on it while reading Game of Thrones and watching Battlestar with my new boyfriend and listening to an endless list of webinars and reading the thousands of pages of reports on electric power delivery.  Which is the topic of my grad project.

So, I think I'm going to finish my first sweater in four years before the end of summer! And I'm actually excited :)

My First FO in a While

Hooray! I finally finished these stress knitting socks for myself.

I love the yarn and the colorway - it's Regia Random Stripe that I got from Rhinebeck this year. 

All in all, they're okay socks - but they sag at the ankle and heel! It's hard to tell from these photos, but as I was wearing them I noticed it.  It sort of makes me feel like an emaciated old lady!

I guess my ankles are just skinnier than my feet.  Who knew? Next time, I'll decrease a few extra stitches at the gusset to make sure the sock sticks.  Another alternative (I think) would be to make the sock longer so that it hits the thicker part of my calf - but I really like the shorter height. 

And, if the socks bother me that much, I'll just give them to my mom :P

DAL Summer 2012 Mood Board!

Whoohoo! This took way longer than I thought it would.  I tried to get as many photos in that I could.  Anyway, you can download it as a desktop background, too, which I think is super cool.  You can click on the file for a larger image or click here for it.

I can't wait to see the mythology-themed ideas and designs!