Two point five skeins, suckah!

And at only about 100 yds per skein! I can't believe that's all it took to make this sweater. Alright, so it's more like a sweater in just the academic sense, but that's my favorite kind of sense! I'm so wearing it to work tomorrow with a black tank top and jeans, I think, and I'll get there a little early to pick out a properly large and funky button for it.

Now what to do with the 4 and a half "left over" skeins. Heh. Well, I could make the sleeves longer here. That shouldn't be a problem. I can probably make them reasonably 3/4 length with the remaining half a skein. But otherwise, um. Well, I think this looks "different" enough without being some kind of floor-length cardigan thing, which it could easily achieve with the remaining yardage. Yeah, that might be a bit too... video game heroine. And I really just don't dig the matching twinset look for some reason. Oh well, I'll think of something some day.

-Trumpet Fanfare-

Aaaaaaall done! Blocking on my living room floor. Finished it this morning, now it's just the waiting game for it to dry. Yes, it's a *cough* couple days later than my intended goal. Funny story, though. About as soon as I published my last post, Kyle came home from work. I told him my brilliant plan of staying up all night to finish the blanket even though I didn't need it done until later. Yeah, no, I don't think so. By around 1-1:30, I didn't need much convincing to go to bed. But don't worry! I was still a sleepy wreck the next day, as Cirilia can attest to. Ah well, such is life.

But now that I've gotten this sucker finally done, I'm on to my next hare-brained scheme! Start and finish this sweater:

Before my long weekend's over. It's out of Artful Yarns Celebrity, bought at a ridiculously low blow-out price at Webs, of course. Got the last 7 balls of this color, which I've always secretly enjoyed. So not too much yardage to work with. Solution: elongated stitches and alternating the sections I work on to get an even distribution of what little yarn I have. This is all one ball! I can hardly believe it myself. Yeah, the raglan looks heinously skimpy in this picture, but I'm working an elongated garter st every right side row, so those rows really stretch out lengthwise or even widthwise, depending. Technically the gauge is 3 per inch, but with this much stretch, all bets are off. And yes, that sleeve is worked in rows and will have to be sewn. I feel like such a top down Judas. But it was just too nutty to make the narrow little sleeves in the round with this strange yarn flopping everywhere. And with such large rows, it shouldn't be too much of a hassle. One of the things I'm really liking about this stitch (wrapping the yarn twice for every stitch on the rs rows, knitting straight across the ws rows, dropping off the extra loops) is how the increases work. Just don't drop off that extra loop! Knit into the back of the second loop, or purl it, or whatever, to keep it "valid" in the appropriate places et voila! A raglan sleeve.

Plans are to make it half or 3/4 sleeve, pretty cropped, single-button cardigan with a big, black, interesting button to make it all work. And I intend to wear it to work Tuesday when I come back. =) Let's see.

No more twist!

11:00 pm, and just done with square 6 of strip 13. I had planned on staying up in to the wee hours working on it, though a moment of futility struck me. I only have enough yarn to maybe get me through this strip, anyway! Is it worth ruining my stomach and making me waste a whole day afterwards recovering? Maybe so... I would only have to work until I ran out of yarn, right? And I'd kind of like to prove to myself that I'm still young, I can still do wild and stupid things like stay up until sunrise and function the next day.

And all the while, I can't get The Tailor of Gloucester out of my head. That little Beatrice Potter story. It was one of my favorite stories as a little bat-tyke. You may remember it. If you're up for a fun bit of story time, you can read it here. Clever little mice help out a poor, old tailor, sewing his soon-due commissioned piece which he despaired of finishing due to the lack of one buttonhole's worth of cherry-colored silk. What knitter can't love and appreciate that?

What I find even cuter is the true story of the Tailor of Gloucester. Seems his young apprentices partied a bit too hard at the nearby pubs after work one night and had to crash on the sewing room floor. To either recompense their employer for the intrusion, or maybe just to give an excuse for why they were there that night, they stitched up the jacket he was commissioned to do. But they ran out of thread for the buttonholes before sewing the last one. In tiny, probably quite hung-over script, they wrote "no more twist" and pinned it to the last buttonhole. When the tailor came in and saw the miraculously completed jacket and the tiny little note. Why, who else could have done it but elves or little mice? I can just see the apprentices' nervous glances to one another. Apparently the tailor made a mint from boasting his magically mouse-made garments. Everyone needs a niche, eh?

But that little diversion leads me to another interpretation of "no more twist." The twist in my wrists! It's nearly dead at this point. My finger tips can still flutter, but without the wrist-twist, my knitting motion's going into my elbows and shoulders, and boy are they complaining. This little typing interlude has helped re-awaken things. Let's see if I can't run out of yarn before the sun shows up.

Knit, knit, knit... I have a blog? Really?... knit, knit.

Well, nothing to do but get back in the saddle again and start posting! Not a lot of pictures with this update, sadly, as many of my projects have been knit and dropped off for professional-type photography already. But I'll try to snag some images of them in the next few days.

That wee brown crescent blossomed into a full sweater with patterned sleeves! An olive hoodie was knit from the top down, hood and sleeves knit by the talented Barbara Dunphy, and I then hastily knit down the rest of the body and the pockets with a little sorta-cabled pattern. An absolutely gorgeous, in my opinion, gray scarf was knitted out of a luscious new yarn called Sheffield so quickly that I barely even got a good look at it. And now I'm in for the home stretch of an afghan out of Rainbow that was rather unexpectedly put into my court.

I go on vacation for a few days on the 9th, so the goal is to try to finish it before then so I can spend my time off on some selfish knitting.

Here is the task before me:
A lap blanket, made in mitred squares knit in long strips. You can see me half-way through a square at the beginning of a strip in the upper right corner there. Each square takes 7-10 minutes depending on how limber my fingers are feeling and how distracted my brain's feeling. There are 20 squares per strip. I have about 4 strips to go. 800 minutes of pure, continuous knitting. 13 hours, 20 minutes. And since I'm doing customer service for the next two days at work, that has to be 13 hours, 20 minutes outside of 9:30-5:30. Not a complaint, mind you! Just... a challenge! Kathy's graciously extended the deadline for me to be after I get back from vacation next Monday, so I do have the vacation time to fall back on. But let's see what these fingers can do before 2 days are out!

It's times like this that I thank the internet gods for old TV shows and MST3Ks on Youtube and for Project Gutenburg. Right now I'm currently plowing through The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling as I knit (it's given away for free all over the internet, by his design) and watching episodes of Connections with James Burke - remember that old show? It's still awesome. And I've also got the first 3 seasons of Homicide:Life on the Street to keep me company. So enough with the typing! Back to the knitting! Hi-ho, rosewood needles!