I am a bit of an obsessive-compulsive nerd. Why do you ask?? Click on those to get a better close-up idea of the nerdiness.

I’m at the point in the knitting of the True Blood Albatross Faery Ring sweater where I get to stop knitting mindless stockinette and start the cable charts for the bodice. There are four different cable charts, so I got out graph paper and pencil this morning and came up with this to help keep track of which cable goes where. Here’s the knitting so far.

The color’s really all wrong there. It’s not that pink, it’s more of a bloody red. I have two more rows of stockinette stitch, then I can set up the cables and go to town. This should be a lot more fun and less of an Albatross at this point.

I have one last photo from the Great Knitting Doctor Family Reunion & Train Trip of 2010. I mentioned that we found a yarn shop in Fergus Falls, MN. It was actually surprisingly well-stocked for a shop in a town that size.

I’m off to find the cable needle and my little box of stitch markers!

First up, spinning!

Here are all the spindles in Spindle Jail. I finally came up with a way to store my spindles that keeps them safe from nosy cats. I actually had asked John to build me something to hang them, and he came home from Target with this.

It’s simply a wire mesh basket. I cut the price tag off, turned it upside down, and voilá, a Spindle Jail. Low tech, but it works. Smart man, that one. He came home with two of these, figuring I’d add to the collection at some point. Very smart man.

There’s been a lot of spinning going on for the Tour de Fleece.

And I’m still working on the never ending pile of Corriedale. In a moment of insanity, I bought 3 pounds of this stuff with the plan to make sweater yarn. I’m almost through the first pound. Since I plan to spin all the singles before I ply it, I needed to figure out some way to store the singles so I could reuse bobbins. I have a bunch of bobbins for my wheel, but not enough to keep spinning 3 pounds of wool. Bobbins are expensive, so I found these. Here they are in action.

Click on that last one to see how pretty my singles are!

Next up, knitting! Yes, I’m still knitting around here, though there’s been damn little of it since the Tour started. I actually finished something.

Project Details:

Started: Oh good grief. I’m pretty sure I didn’t record the date. I finished the last pair of socks in December of last year, for pete’s sake, so I probably started these right away. ETA: not true, apparently. According to Ravelry, I started these in September of 2009. Yup, here we are. I started a second pair, since the pair on the needles was on very sharp Signature dpns that I didn’t think would get through airport security. Incidentally, those were the only pair I knit on those needles. Unlike every other human being who has knit with the Signatures, I didn’t like them, and sold them to Major Knitter.

Finished: This past Thursday, the 15th.

Pattern: Same old pattern, same old plain socks.

Yarn: Wollmeise, purchased before the Wollmeise became really really famous. The color name is Löwenzahn, though John renamed this Squashed Frog. I like Squashed Frog better, since every time I type Löwenzahn, I have to do a Google search for how to do diacritical marks on a Mac.

Needles: 2.25mm Pony Pearl dpns

For: Me

What I Learned: Buy yarn when you see it. This stuff has gotten impossible to get. It is good sock yarn, but not worth stalking shop updates like a madwoman. I still have 3 skeins of this left, so I’m good for awhile. Maybe the furor will have died down by the time I’ve used all of it. It’s superwash wool, but has no nylon, so I added Wooly Nylon to the heels and toes for a little better wear.

For the record, that makes one more project done from the UFO pile. I was very transiently down to 4 projects. It’s back up to 5, since I have to have a sock going. Here’s the new one, started yesterday:

The yarn is from Sanguine Gryphon, her Little Traveller sock yarn. The color name is Penny Pot, NJ. This is really, really nice stuff. I (ahem) might have a few other skeins in the stash. The needles are new also. I caved and bought a set of the Blackthorn needles, size 2.oomm. So far I like them. They are wickedly sharp. That photo is a bit fuzzy, click on it to make it bigger (but just as fuzzy), or go to their website to look at them.

That’s enough for one day. I’m off to hang out with the spinning wheel.

I’ve done a little more work on that UFO/WIP pile.

The whole pile, for your reference:

And The List:

1) True Blood Faery sweater

2) Crazy King Cole Mohair thing, um, stole RIP

3) Wollmeise Squashed Frog Socks

4) Grey Ribbed Peace Fleece Socks with red accents RIP

5) Frootloops Morning Glory Stole

6) Puppy Mittens

7) Evenstar Shawl

8 ) Baktus Shawlette Finished

9) Euroflax Linen Facecloth Finished

10) Spirit In The Sky Beret Finished

First up, #2 on the list.

This is really pretty stuff, but it just wasn’t working. The yarn is King Cole Luxury Mohair, color Biaritz, which is gorgeous. I started this a really loooooonggggg time ago, and just picked up needles and cast on for a garter stitch stole thing. This yarn deserves better, I just don’t know what. I do know that I have no plans to rip mohair anytime again in the near future. If it hadn’t have been 7AM, I’d have considered whiskey. I’m thinking that a feather and fan stole might show this yarn off to better advantage, but for now it’s back in the stash. RIP!

Next is some lovely Peace Fleece.

This was a misguided attempt to use leftovers. I had the Ukrainian Red leftover from a hat that I made a friend, and a couple of skeins of Negotiation Grey from John’s sweater. I decided I would make some heavy weight socks, with the red for cuffs, heels, and toes. I started the ribbing, and hated how it was working out, and it has been in the UFO pile for over two years. I pulled it out of the box yesterday and knit a row and gave up. It needs to be on smaller needles, and wasn’t working with a 2 by 2 rib. Then I tried to find the rest of the grey, and it’s disappeared into the stash somewhere. If you’ve seen my stash, you well know that this is a serious problem. There is no way I will ever find it.  The only way I ever find anything in my stash is if I put it into numbered boxes and record the item in my Mac Bento database. If I just jam something into a box to get it off the floor, thinking I’ll remember where it is, I am totally screwed.  So this one bit the dust as well. The red yarn is in a numbered box, and it’s recorded, so if I ever find the grey yarn, I might resurrect this. For now, it’s gone. RIP!

That leaves me with 5 active projects, which is a lot more manageable. I’d like to get one of those shawls off the list, and then I’ll be at the perfect WIP number: 1 sweater-like project, 1 sock project, 1 lace project, and 1 other small interesting project.

Have a happy Summer Solstice! It’s 51 degrees here, overcast and grey, and forecast to be drizzly all day. Ick. We might break out the gin and tonics tonight anyway, even if the weather’s not cooperating.

And one last item. I have been getting a ton of spam comments lately. My spam filter picks them up and puts them in a holding cell, and usually I scan through them to make sure a real comment wasn’t tagged by mistake. There were so many of them when I signed in this morning that I just deleted them. If you have left a real comment, and it’s not showing up, try again, or email me at loretteireneatcomcastdotnet to let me know.

For those of you keeping track, I’m trying to whittle down the UFO pile into something more manageable this summer. Here’s a list of what I started with, and a photo or two of the whole pile.

1) True Blood Faery sweater

2) Crazy King Cole Mohair thing, um, stole

3) Wollmeise Squashed Frog Socks

4) Grey Ribbed Peace Fleece Socks with red accents

5) Frootloops Morning Glory Stole

6) Puppy Mittens

7) Evenstar Shawl

8 ) Baktus Shawlette

9) Euroflax Linen Facecloth

10) Spirit In The Sky Beret

I think that’s it. The crossed through stuff is finished finished finished. There are a couple of things in that mess that will eventually get frogged and repurposed, but I think eventually most of it will be finished finished finished as well.

And here’s the last finished finished finished thing:

Spirit In The Sky Beret

Project Details:

Started: Hmmm. This is the second go-around for this yarn. It started as a pair of socks way back when in 2007. I took it with me to a knitting retreat in Idaho, and left the second skein of yarn under the bed or something when I left. It hung around as a half-knit single sock for awhile, since I was pretty sure that as soon as I ripped it out that I’d find the other skein. I finally ripped and started this in April 2008.

Finished: Last week.

Pattern: Here.

Yarn: Sock Hop sock yarn, color Spirit In The Sky. One of my favorite oldies songs, by Norman Greenbaum. Of course you can’t get this anymore. If you could, I’d have finished the socks, now wouldn’t have I?

Needles: Size 3.0 double points

For: ?? It doesn’t quite fit me, and I’m just not a beret person, really. It’s a little small for me, and will probably fit a kid in the family. It depends on who gets here first to claim it.

What I learned: Keep track of your yarn while on vacation. I’d have knit this to fit me if I hadn’t been worrying about running out of yarn. The pattern is pretty easy, but I’d be a little nervous knitting it with just one skein of Koigu, which is what the pattern calls for. If you want a slouchier beret, you might need a little more yarn. I thought about doing stripes, but I like what the orange yarn does all by itself, so a kid hat it will be.

And just because I want to, here’s a pretty flower photo I snapped today.

And I can’t for the life of me figure out why that smiley thing is in front of the Baktus shawl instead of a number 8, but I can’t get rid of it, so I guess it stays.

ETA: I fixed the smiley face, thanks to Chris! 

Just because I can.

This is another UFO out of that big UFO pile I showed you a couple weeks ago. It’s a washcloth, so you’d think it wouldn’t have taken me two years or more to finish the thing, wouldn’t you? I picked it out of the pile after the Baktus was finished as an easy one to get done. I’m on the last pattern repeat, then a simple garter border, and it’s done.

And done will be done, even if it’s only a washcloth.

By the way, John reminded me that I never shared our Williamsburg photos with you. He put together a Picasa photo album, if anybody is interested!

We’re still here on vacation, and I’ve managed to take hundreds of photos. There is a ton of stuff to see and do here, and we’re making a grand attempt to take it all in. Today is our last full day here, then we drive back to the DC area for a day, then home.

I did manage to find the yarn shop, and even bought a couple of things. Now there’s a surprise!

I also found some lovely sheep. These are in Colonial Williamsburg. They keep them in the pastures around the old reconstructed town. They shear them every year, and you can buy their wool in the shops. John drew the line at me buying a fleece and trying to stuff it into the overhead bin on the plane, so I settled for some finished wool. I’ll show photos of the loot in a different post when I photograph them. The sheep are Leicester Longwool, an 18th century breed from England.

This next photo might be familiar to those of you in the medical profession who use digoxin in your practice. This stuff (foxglove) grows all over the place here.

The nice thing about having a timeshare is that we have a kitchen. Even I can get tired of eating out for every meal. We tend to have lunch out, then cook dinner at “home”. That way we can have wine with dinner and nobody has to be the designated driver. Here I am stirring the stew pot.

Notice that like any good Colonial woman, I’m doing two domestic chores at once.

Speaking of spinning, I found the weaving and spinning cottage in Williamsburg yesterday. John gets the award of the week for standing patiently while I took photos and asked the very knowledgeable women every question I could think of.

The last place we toured yesterday was the Decorative Arts Museum, which has a fabulous collection of Colonial (and some later periods) furniture, pottery, quilts, and other household decorative items. I could have spent days there alone. The museum is on the site of the former Public Hospital, which was an insane asylum in Colonial times. A corner of the museum has a display of some of the items from the hospital. Here is John, demonstrating that perhaps I have driven him crazy after all.

Today we take the ferry across the James to the Smithfield area. It’s supposed to be hot and humid. The weather here makes me appreciate the Pacific Northwest. If I don’t melt in the heat, I’ll be back again with more photos next time!

OK, I finally got all the WIPs and UFOs out and lined up for a photo shoot. Here’s a photo of the whole mess.

There are ten unfinished projects in that pile. Let me show you a photo of everything out of the bags.

This is rather unsettling for someone who insists that three WIPs is my comfort zone. I clearly need to get to work and get some weeding out done. Rather than overwhelm you with descriptions of all of these at once, I’ll do them one at a time.

First up is the Lacy Baktus.

I’m about half done with this. This is pretty much mindless knitting, as long as I remember to keep track of what row of the pattern I’m on. I started this one back in February. Let’s see how much of this I can get done between now and the next post, shall we?

We’ve had another of those weird spring days here. Cold, pouring rain, grey, and then all of a sudden, bright and sunny. That didn’t last, but it got me outside with the camera to try to get a decent photo of the color of my Evenstar shawl. This will have to do, since it’s pouring rain again. At least it’s raining in the front yard. The sun is still shining in the back yard. Weird.

That’s the best it’s going to get. The inside photos of this color just look pale grey-blue. In real life, it’s a pale clear aquamarine color. The yarn is a cashmere silk 2-ply light laceweight from Colourmart, for those of you not keeping up.

Oh, good, now it’s a downpour out back too, that was worrying me.

I never did show any photos of our trip out to Whidbey Island for the spin-in and visit with Dorothy. Here are a couple of Deception Pass, probably the most photographed spot in Washington. Click these to embiggen.

Here’s John, as usual, not following directions:

And here are a couple from the spinning day:

There were some serious opportunities for fiber stash enhancement, and I did not pass many of them by unheeded. Here’s one, already on the spindle.

This is a blend of deep red, blue and purple wool, along with some firestar sparkly stuff. There’s about three ounces of it total, and I think it will be a light fingering when I’m done with it. We’ll see. I think that would make a pretty little neck thing, either a scarf or a cowl.

I’ve been spending much of the last few days that I’ve had off trying to organize my fiber office. Fiber Office, that sounds sort of official, doesn’t it? Much better than the Pit of Despair, which is what it usually looks like. Now that it’s a bit more organized, I have discovered that I have way too many WIPS and UFO’s than my usual comfort zone allows. I really need to get knitting on some of them. Hopefully you all will see some progress soon on things.

One last thing. I’ve been looking at my blog stats. The funniest three search strings that got people here lately are “big stonking circular shawl”, “clean knitters stories”, and “goofy knitting”. I’m not making that up. I’m off to knit…

ETA: “pee blog knit”. One silly person actually got to my blog by typing that into Google. If you’re that person, please comment and explain exactly what you were looking for.

The Evenstar shawl project almost bit the dust last night.  I’m behind, as usual. This is a “mystery shawl”, and the clues come out every other Friday. Today clue 5 is due to be released, and I’m just starting clue 3. Every other row so far has been a plain knit row, and on the last row of clue 2, I put in a lifeline in case of trouble. In this case the lifeline was the trouble. I’m using a very fine crochet thread in white, as I was a little nervous about my usual dental floss cutting the near cobweb yarn I’m using.

Anyway, I had done the lifeline on the last row of clue 2, done the first row of clue 3, and set it aside a couple days ago. I picked it up last night, knit around the second row, then set it down while we had dinner. After dinner is where the trouble began. Actually it was after a couple of glasses of wine and a long phone conversation with my sister, so I could probably blame her, though I suspect it was more the wine. I picked it up and looked at it, mind you this was in a dark TV room with only a reading light, I noticed a long loop of yarn back a whole row or two. I’ve done this before, somehow getting a loop of yarn not pulled all the way through, so it leaves a loose loop just hanging there. Crap crap crappity crap. I tinked back, messing up a couple of repeats in the process, and got partway around the row, thinking that I was royally screwed.

Some Knitting Angel must have been sitting on my shoulder. Instead of continuing to tink deeper and deeper into the Mines of Moria, I decided rather wisely to set it aside and go to bed. I woke up this morning thinking about it, and reluctantly pulled it out of the bag to investigate. In the light of day, what I thought was a mistake loop of yarn back two rows, you guessed it….it was my long loop of lifeline hanging there. Nope, didn’t need to tink at all. This, as you might imagine, resulted in some well-deserved self-head-slapping. And now I was still left with the mess from tinking. On a couple of the repeats, I dropped a couple of stitches down to the lifeline. I counted around carefully, marking the offending repeats with pins, then had a bit more coffee before proceeding.

After a serious consideration of going out on a quest to cast this whole thing into the Fires of Mount Doom, I decided to suck it up and fix it. Armed with teeny tiny crochet hooks and teeny tiny double points, I got those blasted fracked up repeats fixed. Here’s a photo.

And here’s a photo of that lifeline.

I’m leaving it in, of course. It might just save my sorry knitting-butt yet.

We’re off for the weekend. Dorothy and her husband have invited us and the mutts up to Whidbey Island for the weekend for a local spin-in. I need to go get packed. I’ve got the camera packed, so you might even get to see some photos!

As I was rummaging through projects this morning to take photos, I noticed a striking similarity.

Really, I’m generally more eclectic in color choices than this would lead you to believe.

From the top: Baktus, in a lovely merino silk blend DK; Evenstar Mystery Shawl; and my latest spinning project. This is Yarn Chef fiber, I’m too lazy to get up and find the band, but it’s a silk blend of some sort. I’ll post more about it some other time.

I had a little dust-up with those two knitting projects the past few days, both stupid bone-head knitting mistakes. Making an error and having to tink back on a near-cobweb weight shawl is a little more understandable, at least. I got stuck on one patterned row where the stitch markers shifted one stitch sideways all along the row. On one repeat my count was off. I counted, recounted, tried to figure out where the error was, and finally tinked back the whole patterned row, then back the preceding plain knit row until I got to the repeat where the count was off (almost all the way around the row, I might add). By the time I got it tinked back, the count was now right. I counted, recounted, said a few choice swear words, and proceeded forward again, holding my breath and counting every single blasted repeat as I went. There was no error, I just think I can’t count. Or perhaps one of the stitch markers had migrated temporarily under a stitch. Or who knows, the Knitting Goddess might be trying to teach me a lesson. There wasn’t even bourbon involved in this one, I swear.

The blue scarf mistake is really bone-headed, though, almost enough so that I don’t want to put it out here for all of you to laugh at me. I figure it’s my civic duty, however. If you click on over to the pattern, you’ll see that, after the initial set up rows, it’s a simple 8 row pattern repeat. Simple, simple, simple. I got 24 repeats done correctly earlier this week, did a couple more repeats, then picked it up to knit again yesterday. The repeat basically is the lace yarn over row with 3 garter stitch ridges in between. On the last two repeats, there were only 2 garter stitch rows. Damn. Out it came, and I reknitted another two repeats, and noticed that I still only had 2 garter ridges. Out it came again. I’m embarrassed to say that I did this drill one more time before I figured out the mistake.

If you’ll look at the pattern, the last two rows, rows 7 & 8, are plain knit. Because of the way the pattern formats, it printed out on two pages, with rows 7 & 8 on the second page. You can see where this is going, can’t you? I did the first 24 repeats with all 8 pattern rows, then inexplicably just changed the pattern to a 6 row repeat, omitting those last 2 rows. I figured this out last night during about the quintillionth NCIS rerun I watched, at about 1 AM, and just cracked up. If I was Tony DiNozzo, Mark Harmon would have smacked me hard on the back of the head. It’s now fixed, and I’ve hand-written those last two rows on the first page so the pattern is all together, and hopefully I won’t do that again.

It’s late, I’m off to bed. I’ll try to find some other idiotic knitting goofs to regale you with next time!