Lorette

Sick day

The creeping crud from yesterday was enough to keep me home today. I haven’t done anything all day except sleep and drink tea. I’m starting to feel a bit more human, so I should be able to go to work tomorrow. It isn’t anything serious, I’m just whiny and really hate being sick. It seems like such a waste of time. I have found that I don’t bounce back from being sick as well as I used to. I suppose it’s that aging thing. I realized a couple of weeks ago, to my dismay, that I am the oldest person working in my clinic. I’m twice as old as some of them, and three times as old as a few. Sigh.

I did start that new Hitchhiker yesterday during the Seahawks game.

Wollmeise Pure, 100% merino, color is Flower Power. I’ve quit trying to use straight merino to make socks, it doesn’t wear as well under foot.

And as you can see, I’m making a valiant effort to stay awake and do a little medical review. It makes me feel a little less like a slacker for staying home from work. We’ll see how long that lasts.

Hitchhiker, take two

That right there is a Finished Project. I finished this one on the plane ride home from Poland, I just haven’t gotten around to posting about it officially.

Project Notes:

Yarn: Wollmeise Pure, 100% fingering weight merino. Delightful to work with and to wear.

Needles: 3.25mm. I started on straights, but transferred it to a circular for travel.

Pattern: Hitchhiker, by Martina Behm. As of today, there are 31.7K projects on Ravelry using this pattern. It is the most commonly knit pattern! This is the second one of these I’ve made.

Modifications: None

What I learned/love about this: This is such a versatile “little neck thing”. It’s an easy pattern, perfect for meetings or TV watching. I have no doubt that I’ll make more of these.

Pattern/yarn rating: ***** on both. The pattern is clear, and the yarn has the most vibrant colors. I have a bunch more of this in the stash, I just might start another one for those times that I need to pay attention to something but still want to knit.

I was a bit tempted by that Wollmeise link up there. I checked my stash, though. I have another eight hanks of this in some mighty lovely colors. I think I’ll go dig one of those out the boxes and cast on!

NaBloPoMo

Otherwise known as National Blog Posting Month. The idea is to commit to writing a blog post daily in November. It’s a riff off of NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month.

You all are going to get sick and tired of seeing the same unfinished knitting projects, so I plan on changing it up a bit and adding a little non-knitting content.

Today it’s meditation. Carole wrote today about her meditation practice. I’ve meditated off and on for years, though my practice has slipped a bit more recently. I find myself using all sorts of excuses, like I’m too busy, and I’m too stressed out. Of course, scheduling a meditation practice every day helps enormously with that sense of being too busy or too stressed.

See how that works?

Anyway, I have been using the Calm app, I can do either one of many guided meditations, or just use their meditation timer, with or without soothing background music or sounds. I have found that doing a daily meditation practice really does slow down those squirrels in my head that run around like crazy banshees.

At work, I have this tiny note on my computer.

Yes, it does really help to have that little reminder.

And here’s a screen shot from the Calm app.

If you don’t already have a regular meditation practice, give it a try.

Trust me, I’m a doctor.

November

How the heck did that happen? Time to start thinking about Thanksgiving plans and Christmas.

It also is time to start thinking about wool. Specifically nice wooly sweaters.

I’m currently knitting Shinsetsu. It was on the back burner for most of the summer, but now it’s just the perfect thing to knit. And I want to wear it before winter is over.

That’s the back. The front is all lovely cables and a wide shawl collar. The back is just plain knitting. I’m up to where the sleeves will be. I am modifying this in one way. The back is knit in reverse stockinette, meaning that what is normally thought of as the wrong side of the knit fabric is the public side. I detest the look of that, so I’m doing it my way.

Here is the pattern page on Ravelry so you can see what it looks like finished.

Lace reboot

Kiri was a bust. I spent much of the day trying to get it started. The pattern is described as easy, for beginner knitters. After a couple of false starts and tinking back, I eventually ripped it out. I’m not a beginner lace knitter by any means, but there was something wonky with this pattern. I couldn’t get the stitch counts to come out, and I just didn’t like the look of the pattern in this yarn. Last but not least, I use Knit Companion to keep track of absolutely everything I knit, but especially lace charts. The grid on the pattern chart was “off”, with grid squares that varied ever so slightly from place to place. This made adding stitch markers and counts impossible. It was driving me nuts.

So here is the reboot:

This is much better behaved. The entire thing is charted, the pattern repeats don’t shift around aimlessly, and best of all, the main shawl body chart has 16 rows, 12 of which are plain knit or purl rows. This is much more what I had in mind to keep my sanity.

The pattern is Feather Duster, by Susan Lawrence.

By the way, WordPress has stopped emailing me blog comments again. I can still reply directly from the website, but if I miss a comment and don’t answer you, that’s why. ????

I might have lost my mind

I finished my Hitchhiker shawl on the long plane ride home yesterday (finished project post later when I find it in the heap of bags). So I had an itch to start something new. Meet Cloud Blue Kiri:

I purchased the yarn when we were in Carnation and Duvall WA a few weeks ago. We stopped at Tolt Yarn & Wool, and this was one of my purchases. It is Biches et Bûches Le Petit Silk & Mohair. I’m not quite sure what possessed me to start yet another lace shawl, especially in fuzzy lace weight mohair. If you’ve ever knit with Kidsilk Haze, this is similar, but if anything, with longer mohair “feathers”. Any mistakes in this are likely not going to get ripped back. The pattern is Kiri, which is a similar version of Birch, but top down so you don’t have to cast on (and count) millions of stitches. I knit Birch 15 years ago, and there isn’t enough whisky in the world to make me do that cast on again.

For those of you keeping track, this makes four lace shawls on the needles. My plan was actually to start a simple project to take the place of the Hitchhiker, but this yarn just rolled out of the bag and into my lap. It’s mighty pretty yarn, but I might need that whisky before this is all over.

Hat for a friend

I finished a hat today for yet another friend going through chemo. I enjoy knitting for friends, but I hate the reason behind this. Cancer sucks. But the hat is cute.

Project Details:

Pattern: Tebe Slouch hat

Yarn: Cascade Ultra Pima cotton in Cobalt

Needles: 3.25 mm

Modifications: The body of the hat has a k2tog/yo row every 12th row. I substituted a plain knit row for that, since you don’t want a hat full of holes if you are losing your hair.

Project rating: Love it. The yarn is a little splitty, but the color is rich, and the yarn is very soft. The pattern is very well written and easy to follow. John and I both might need one of these in a wooly winter yarn.

Honest

I can stop any time I want*.

*She says, whilst sitting in her jammies at 2 PM

45 minutes

I am making progress on my Winter Solstice (aka Longest Night) shawl. I “only” have 80 rows left.

Here’s what it will look like when done. Photo shamelessly copied from the pattern page.

And 45 minutes? That’s how long it is taking me to knit each of those rows. And they keep getting longer by 4 stitches every other row. The shawl should be named Longest Knit.

Lots of lace

I posted a couple of months ago about the leftover yarn from my Evenstar shawl.

I didn’t weigh the yarn on the cone before I started using it, so I decided to wind it off so I could get an accurate yardage measurement for how much is left.

75 grams left, or 1150 yards. I was surprised by how much is left. That’s enough for a nice sized shawl. It’s a lovely cashmere silk blend, so back into the stash it goes to await its own special project.

Here’s to a nice Labor Day weekend for us all! We’re doing our big annual fried chicken dinner for some friends and neighbors tomorrow. I’ll post some photos.

Back to basics

It’s time to get back to flute playing. I had an unintentional 2 1/2 month “break” from practicing this summer. Boy, does it show.

So back to slow scales, long tones, and an easy etude book.

I’m sure the neighbors are overjoyed.

Blog Malfunction

WordPress has been driving me a bit nuts. I mostly post from either my iPhone or iPad, but photos taken with an iOS app end up going sideways when you look at them on a desktop. I’ve known about this for awhile, but figure most people are like me and use mostly the phone/ipad and not my desktop.

I waded in to this today, which turned into a couple hour black hole. You can rotate them all you want on either phone or desktop, and they still come out screwy. So this is one of many attempts to try to fix it.

I’ll hit post. If it’s sideways, I’m going downstairs and pouring myself a big glass of whisky.

And yes, that’s new yarn up there. It will probably be the last for awhile, since we have a couple of big trips coming up that we need to pay for.

We’re all doing the things we love

Nice recovery

I’m back in business with the cardigan.

Fortunately it’s a fun pattern, and lovely yarn, so I didn’t really mind having a do-over. Now it’s just mindless stockinette with some back shaping thrown in.

And I even remembered to change needle size like I was supposed to after the lace bit. I’m sure I’ll find something else to screw up along the way.

Someone remind me to cast on the correct size for the fronts when I get there.

Oh holy hell

Remember that new sweater I started? The one I showed you a swatch of a while back?

Here’s what it will look like when done, except not pink.

Pretty, eh?

So here is what the back looked like this morning.

And a closeup of that cable/lace pattern.

I finished that section yesterday. This morning before I headed off to work, I did the first row on the plain stockinette section, putting in the stitch markers as I went to mark where the waist shaping goes.

45 stitches, marker, 43 stitches, marker, 45 stitches. Wait, there are more stitches. I counted again. Then I realized that the “leftover” stitches were exactly ONE 14 stitch repeat worth of stitches.

Here are your choices:

A. I can’t count.

B. I cast on and knit that whole f’ing section using the wrong size numbers.

Yup.

I stuffed the whole thing in a bag and went to work. I prayed to the knitting gods that it would be fixed by the time I got home.

Here it is now.

If this wasn’t damned expensive Rowan Cotton Cashmere, I can tell you, I’d be tempted to build a bonfire with it. This better go as planned the next time.