Month: October 2008

The Great Stash Knit-Down

I have a new item over there on the sidebar. Now that the economy is in the toilet, I’m very excited that I have boxes and boxes of stash to knit from. My sister-in-law Ena is visiting, as I mentioned in my last post. After she got settled in to our guest room, she came upstairs laughing. First she had to move a bunch of stash boxes around in the closet so she could have room to hang up clothes. Then she noticed Lewey talking to something he imagined was under the bed, so she got down to look. Yup, more yarn. I didn’t take her upstairs to see the 2 huge boxes of sock yarn, and the huge box of lace yarn in my office.

Anyway, I’m not committing to not buying any more yarn. You all know me better than that, and that plan has never gone well. I am simply committing to publicly keeping track of all the forward (or backward!) movement in my stash yardage. If I use a skein of yarn, the yards get added. If I buy a skein of yarn, the yards get subtracted from the total. Let’s hope it stays out of the minus numbers. I’m starting out with adding all the yarn I’ve used so far for the not-Cobblestone sweater. After this I’ll update it as each ball of yarn is used/added. My blog, my rules.

Ena is also a beginning knitter. She is knitting dishcloths as practice, and brought her knitting with her. Here is her first fine effort, and a photo of her knitting. Will you all please welcome the newest member of our fold, and encourage her on her progress?


She finished the first dishcloth in less than two evenings, so I’m pretty sure she’s hooked. I actually heard her say “just let me finish one more row” a couple of times. We went to the LYS today so she could stock up on her very own needles and more yarn (and stitch markers, tapestry needles, etc!).

Last but not least, here’s my hippie car, just to let you know who I’m voting for this fall.**

We vote by absentee ballot every year, and finished our voting this morning over coffee.

Whoever you are planning on voting for this year, get out there and get it done!

**Yes, I have a license plate, I’m blocking it out for safety reasons!

And The Fun Begins…

…As EZ says in her book, Knitting Workshop. As you all may recall, I’m knitting a not-Cobblestone sweater, and have been for months now. I did the body as written up to the underarms, then tossed out the pattern. For the rest of it I’m using EZ’s directions in the above-mentioned book, though I plan on modifying the neck shaping when I get there, using Jacqueline Fee’s Sweater Workshop. I finally finished the body and sleeves.

I now have the whole thing knitted together, with about 2 inches done on the yoke.

I’m enjoying the challenge of knitting a sweater in the round, but I’m not sure I’d do this often. The whole thing is pretty unwieldy once it’s knitted together, and makes it entirely a non-portable project at this point. The only advantage that I can see is not having to sew things together at the end, but I really don’t mind sewing knitting together. (Don’t send me all your sewing to do for you!)

John’s sister Ena is here visiting for the week, and we’ve been cooking up a storm. Here’s part of last night’s dinner. We had fresh steelhead salmon from the market, grilled, along with braised kale and risotto. The risotto was made using fresh chanterelle mushrooms we found at the farmers market, and was delicious. Unfortunately we didn’t get any photos of the whole meal on the plate, but here’s the in-progress shots of the risotto:

Yes, it was yummy. I’m off to enjoy the sunshine!

Not Dead Yet!

Well, that wasn’t really an intentional month-long blog break. I’ve had some ugly-icky stuff going on at work over the past several weeks that I really couldn’t blog about (still can’t), for confidentiality reasons, but just really didn’t feel like blogging about anyway. Most of the posts would have been:

Nothing new at work that I can talk about.
Nothing new in my personal life, because work sucks and also sucks out my life-blood.
No new knitting.
Haven’t taken a photo of anything in weeks.
The End.

Ok, things are better, work doesn’t suck anymore, and I actually knit a row or two yesterday. When I got an email today from a reader asking if I was OK, I figured I better post something to let you all know that I’m not dead. I’ve finally had some good news at work, and after all, I have a secure job that pays well, not any small thing in the current economy. I’ve also had a birthday in the past two weeks, relatively obscured by the work-suckyness, but a birthday none-the-less. I’ve had champagne in the past week, and got some lovely birthday flowers and cards, as well as a set of quite perfect Bose noise-cancelling headphones from my sweetiepie. And chocolate. Let’s not forget the non-suckyness of chocolate.

Knitting? Look at the last few posts, I’ve not made much progress. The Not-Quite-A-Cobblestone is half a sleeve and a yoke short of a full sweater. My Arctic Circle Monkey socks are one sock short of a pair. I haven’t knit a single stitch on that Peacock shawl, and the orange Morse code socks are in time-out. I’ve decided that I can only deal mentally with 1 pair of socks at a time.

And let’s not forget, while we’re talking about good things, that I’m writing a blog post while my husband is down cooking me dinner. I’m off to join him for a post-work glass of wine. I’ll be back soon, hopefully with a knitting update!