Month: September 2010

Swear Words…

Or,

It Was Bound To Happen

A basic rule of knitting is this: When you put something in writing on your blog such as “I have actually been very slowly making progress on that True Blood Faery albatross”, the knitting gods will bite you very hard in the butt.

I’m sure you all remember what I’m knitting. In case you don’t, it’s the Faery Ring sweater, by Mary Scott Huff. Here’s the best set of photos of the one she knit for her mom. Look closely at the front cabled section. Get the arrangement of those front cables in your heads so when you look at mine you will know why I invented several new ways to combine all the swear words I know into complete sentences.

When I started the cabled section, I spent several hours with knitters’ graph paper and pencil, plotting out the cable arrangement so it would be easier to knit. This past week I finally picked it up again after a couple of months sitting in time-out. I got to about row 10 of the cabled section and stopped. I had made a few minor errors when I was doing the charting part, and every time I would get to those bits, I’d convert it to the correct stitch in my head, but sooner or later I was bound to forget to do so. I figured I’d get out the paper and re-do the chart correctly, to make it more idiot-proof. Here’s a photo of the geeky nerdiness that is me. Click on it to see.

As I was finishing the second, revised, version of my chart, I realized the true error of my ways. This is not a little error. The whole damned jacket is knit in one piece up to the armholes, so each row is 308 stitches. 10 rows of that is 3080 stitches. After smacking my head on the table a few times, I got the sweater and looked hard at it in every direction, hoping that maybe, just maybe I hadn’t followed my own damned chart, but instead, somehow, had magically done it correctly.

Nope. Look again at Mary’s front center section, then mine. There are supposed to be a bunch of cables running beautifully on either side of that front center line. The 21 stitch section of seed stitch in my photo is supposed to be along the sides, under the armholes, not front and center. When I did my chart, I just made up my own arrangement of the cable sections. I have beautiful little cables under my armpits, and lovely seed stitch in front, where it doesn’t belong. I knew there was a reason I hate seed stitch.

Damn, damn, double f-ing damn. And then some. Out it came. There is one good thing. Having gone through this whole exercise, I realize that I really don’t need my honking 5-page chart. There are only 4 different cables, and they are all different stitch counts. There’s a 2-stitch cable, a 4 stitch cable, a 6 stitch cable, and a large 20 stitch cable. Once you get markers placed on the first row, you just do the cable that fits into the number of stitches you have in front of you. And then try to remember to do reverse stockinette stitch on the other stitches. I’m not promising anything at this point.

FO!

This was absolutely the easiest FO in the world! All I had to do was let Dorothy and her husband stay here one night earlier this summer. As a “hostess” gift, she brought this. I’ve been quite remiss in posting about it!

Isn’t that gorgeous? The photo does not do justice to Dorothy’s perfect stitches. Click on it to get a better look. Of course the color is all off. It’s really more of a wine-colored red, not as orangey red as that looks on my monitor. The shawl pattern is Hidcote Garden Shawl, by Miriam Felton, the yarn is an unknown lace from Dorothy’s stash. Whatever it is, I adore it. Thanks, Dorothy! I like the pattern enough that I could see knitting one myself. Though maybe my plan should be to pack up all the lace yarn, send it to Dorothy, and then just invite her down for weekend visits.

Here’s another FO, this time my own. No, it’s not knitting. I’m still working on all the same stuff. Though I have actually been very slowly making progress on that True Blood Faery albatross. I can actually almost see little cables starting to appear, it just doesn’t look like it in a photo. No, this FO is of the spinning variety.

The fiber is from Spunky Eclectic, a merino-tencel blend. The official color name was “Walking on the Sun”. Every time I would spin, all I could think about was that goofy 80’s song “Walking on Sunshine” by Katrina & the Waves. I couldn’t get it out of my head, so I decided to change it. I think it looks like a Tequila Sunrise, and I like that song much better, so there you have it. You have to put up with some crappy ads to get to that song by the way, but it’s worth it to watch Glenn Frey sing for a few minutes. Ahem. Yes, well, back to the fiber. It’s spindle-spun, on my Bosworth midi spindle. It’s not washed yet, but I figured I better get a photo up while I was thinking about it.

I ran across this rather grisly news story when bouncing around the internet this week. This is enough to get me to make plans to do a major dredging in the house. We did just that a few years back, hauling carloads of stuff to Goodwill and the local garbage dump. Somehow it always finds its way back in, though. We’re getting to that age where the reality is that someday in the not-too distant future we’ll need and want to downsize to a smaller place. I’m thinking it would be less painful to get rid of stuff in small increments rather than all at once when we are ready  to move. Don’t worry, I’m not starting with the fiber and yarn stash just yet, though. I’m not that crazy.

Next time, I promise a photo or two of my own knitting!

Where Have I Been??

Oh dear. Here I am again, apologizing for an unintended blog vacation. Wait, I have an excuse! The last bit of summer got a bit busy around here. We did a week’s vacation with John’s kids and the grandkids and all the dogs, to the Washington coast (that would be the Left Coast for any of you from the Atlantic-side Washington). It was a grand time. I actually took the week as an “education” week, meaning that I had to spend part of each day reading medical stuff, but that worked OK, surprisingly. We’d rented a huge house just up the sand from the beach, and each of the 3 families had their own floor for bedroom space. The little ones are getting old enough that they aren’t up at the crack of dawn, and they tended to spend the whole day outside, so I did actually get some reading done. Here’s the link to all the photos, if you really want to see all the “good big fun” that we had.

Part 2 of the excuse is a bit of a slog at work. We’ve had several docs out off and on during the summer for a variety of reasons, so it’s gotten a bit busy and hectic at work. That plus the belated arrival of summer around here meant that I haven’t spent much time knitting or playing around on the computer. We get such a seemingly short summer here that we tend to spend most of it outside.

To start off the fall season, John and I took a couple days this week and went up to Mt. Rainier National Park. We’ve been up there to drive around and to hike a bit in the past, but I’ve never stayed overnight in the lodge at Paradise before. Tuesday I got off work, got home and finished packing, and we made the drive up the mountain to the lodge. We had a beautiful day for hiking yesterday. It rained most of the day today, but it was still beautiful for the drive back home, and I get to go to work tomorrow. I’m sure John will get a photoshow done at some point, but here are a few:

That’s Paradise Inn. It’s one of the original National Park lodges, built in 1916 and renovated completely a few years ago. The main lodge accommodations have rooms with shared bathrooms and showers down the hall, which is funky but adds to the historic feel. The great lobby of the lodge is spectacular, including an ancient piano which has been restored. They have a pianist who plays during the dinner hour, adding to the charm of the place.

Here’s John as we set out on our hike up the mountain yesterday. We live in the shadow of Mt. Rainier, and it’s one of those landscape features that sometimes you take for granted. I had to be reminded on this trip that “the mountain” is actually in the same county I live in. Cool!

We saw a surprising number of wildflowers still in bloom. There were lupine, paintbrush, and an awful lot of something that I thought was valerian, but another hiker told me was lovage.

We saw this little fellow early on in the hike. He (or she, I didn’t get close enough to look!) meandered along the path, but after a bit, gave a huff at us and lumbered away. That’s a black bear, by the way, and if you keep your distance and don’t get between them and their children, or corner them, they mostly leave people alone. There are no grizzly bears in the park.

More flowers.

More fauna. These are marmots, or whistle pigs. These are all over the park, and are completely unafraid of humans. They will whistle loudly if alarmed, thereby getting the nickname. This one was clearly a girl with hot flashes. After we took a few photos, she got up and ambled over to a nearby snow patch.

She just flattened out on the snow and stayed there. I wonder if that would work for me?

There’s the famous mountain that we hiked toward. At the lower half of that photo is the Nisqually Glacier.

And there’s the Nisqually River, which of course starts from that glacier. The river ends up in Puget Sound, right in our back yard. If that mountain blows a la Helen, this is one of the major lahar paths, so we’d be in some serious trouble.

There was of course the requisite sock photo. This proves that I indeed still knit. In fact, I sat down at the Glacier Vista point and knit a round, to the amusement of all of the other hikers passing by.

We met two young women with 2 toddlers, climbing up the hill, while we were on our way back down the mountain. Part of this trail is paved at the lower end, but as you climb up, it gets gravelly, then rocky, then with a bunch of very steep rock steps on the upper third. They had ditched the baby carriage about a third of the way up the trail and just went on, lugging the toddlers by hand. About twenty minutes after we saw them, we ran across the carriage down the hill.

More flowers!

More whistle pigs! Click to embiggen!

That’s it. There are lots more photos, but that pretty much does it. Oh, John did get a photo of me spinning away on my spindle in the grand lobby of the Inn last night, but it’s on his camera. When I get my hands on it, I might remember to post it as well.

I’m still knitting the same damn things. Maybe now that the weather’s cooler, I’ll make some progress and show photos!