Category: Just Happy!

New Sweater Friday

I needed another knitting project. I finished my Rogue sweater almost three months ago. I’ve been dithering around, trying to find the perfect yarn/pattern match since then.

Here were my criteria for the perfect Next Sweater. It needed to be stash yarn. I have sweater quantities of yarn for over 20 sweaters. I’m not buying more until I use some of that.

I want a cardigan, shawl collar sweater. It needs to be knit in pieces and seamed, just my personal preference.

After a lot of research, I settled on this yarn.

This is actually from deep stash. We took a trip to Orcas Island in 2005, and I bought this from a farm we found there. It’s a gorgeous natural brown wool alpaca blend. It’s been patiently waiting in the stash for just the right moment.

Here’s the pattern.

Isn’t that lovely?

Here’s the pattern link, it’s Shinsetsu.

And here’s my start.

The pattern uses a new-to-me cast on, a ribbed cable cast on. It’s like a regular cable cast on, except you do every other stitch knit or purl. It makes a nice firm lower edge that works well with knit one/purl one ribbing.

In other news, it’s our anniversary today. John and I were married 24 years ago today. Here we are in a recent photo from our Italy trip.

And Another New Project

There really isn’t any limit, is there? Knitters seem to fall into two camps, those who have numerous things going at once, and those that just work on a few things at a time. I know knitters who have thirty or forty projects going at once, and I know a very few that only do one at a time, finishing it before starting something new. There are even a few rare ones who only BUY YARN for one project at a time. What’s up with that? What if you finished and the stores were closed? That’s the stuff of nightmares right there.

I sort of fall in between. I like to have a simple sock going, maybe a sweater, a lace project, and at least one simple thing that’s not a sock. But I’m not opposed to having more than one of each of those categories if I’m getting bored.

Here’s the new thing. This is in the category of “simple but not a sock”.

It’s another Hitchhiker, one of the most popular patterns out there. There are nearly 30,000 projects listed for this on Ravelry. The yarn is from deep stash, a skein of Wollmeise Pure that I bought before Wollmeise was as popular as it is now. The yardage with these skeins is huge, 525 meters, so it’s great for a little “shawlette”.

And yes, I should be working on that CME and not starting new knitting projects. I can only answer so many multiple choice questions before I’m ready to stab myself to death with my knitting needles.

Onward.

Sleeve Island, Part Eleventy-Billion

I actually have gotten some knitting done this past few weeks, though damned little. It’s been the usual holiday season chaos around here, with too much to get done and not enough time to just sit and knit.

I’m in that endless part of sleeve knitting, where it just keeps getting wider and wider, with ever longer rows. This Peace Fleece yarn is so lovely that I am enjoying it though. And that is a good thing, since I have enough Peace Fleece in different colors to make nine more sweaters. I keep looking at their colors that I don’t have (admittedly not very many!), but I really need to stick with the plan and not buy more until I use some of what I have.

On that note, it’s been nearly 3 months since my last yarn purchase. I’m going to try to get to a year again. We’ll see how that goes. When it comes to those pretty pretty colors, I don’t have a lot of will power!

I hope your holiday season is full of joy and peace!

Mind the Gap!

We have had a fun couple of days in London for the start of our England vacation. John got off the plane feeling under the weather on Friday and Saturday right after we got here, so Saturday I was on my own. I walked pretty much the entire Kensington Garden park, which is right across the street where we are staying. And I found a yarn shop.

Loop London is on a tiny walking-only street with a bunch of other little shops. It’s not a big shop, but it has some mighty fine yarn choices. Here’s what I came away with.

There are two skeins of lace yarn from Eden Cottage, and two Wollmeise Pure wool yarn. The first two will be shawls someday, the last two will likely be small “neck things”, which I am growing quite fond of.

John is all better now, and we’ve spent our time being tourists, and doing a lot of walking. We’ve got the tube system sorted, at least for our little local neighborhood, and buses and taxis will get us everywhere else.

Here are a few other photos:

Every single tourist here takes their photo in front of one of the iconic London telephone booths.

Even better with Big Ben in the background.

There are lots of fine pubs.

We had a tour of St. Paul Cathedral today. What a remarkable place. We got there just before their midday Eucharist service, so I was privileged to attend that.

You hear “Mind the gap” about every few minutes while riding the Tube. I suspect if you are a Londoner, you don’t find it quite so amusing.

And this last photo is your medical public service reminder for the day. If you haven’t gotten your flu jab yet, please do so!

Tomorrow we take the train to Canterbury for another adventure!

Blockhead

It only took me a month and a half to getting around to blocking the Ruffles shawl. In my defense, it’s been 90 degrees here, and I can’t wear it anyway.

At any rate, I got it washed and pinned out this morning.

I just did a “down and dirty” blocking. This yarn and the garter stitch makes for a really squishy comfy fabric, and I didn’t want to change that too much.

This is the first time I’ve used those blocking pins. They are from Knitter’s Pride, and it really makes getting a straight edge easy. I would need a ton more of them to do a bigger lace shawl, but I might just fork over the money for another set. They aren’t cheap, and I have a huge set of blocking wires that work just fine, they’re just fidgety. I went to a local welding shop several years ago and bought a big pack of thin wires. They work just like the expensive fancy blocking wires and were dirt cheap. I’ll probably think about it for a bit, it’s around $25 for one set of those**, and I’d probably need a couple more for a huge shawl. I think I might rather spend that on yarn. Not that I need that either.

I’ll show a modeled photo once it’s dry. And maybe once the temperature here drops into a reasonable range for woolies.

**Update. Amazon has them for 20 bucks, with free Prime shipping, so they’re on their way.

Ahhhh.

Sunday afternoon on the lake, me, my knitting, and the cat. It doesn’t get much better than this.

I’m still working on the same projects, slowly but surely. The lovely stuff in the photo is the Afghanistan cashmere, I’m knitting 22 Little Clouds with it.

For those of you following my attempts at not buying yarn, I caved yesterday and made a purchase. I’ll post a photo when it gets here, but here is where I got it from. I’m sure you would have given in as well. I made it a few days past 8 months this time. Go sign up for her newsletter, and you’ll be tempted too.

Ooooh!

After I finished the Ruffles shawl, I needed to cast on another semi-mindless project. I mentioned in my last post that I might do another Hitchhiker shawl, so I started rummaging around in my yarn stash for the perfect yarn.

I found this.

I bought this from Peace Fleece about a year ago, and it’s been sitting in a lonely yarn box ever since. The Peace Fleece owners contracted with a group of women from Afghanistan and bought some of their hand spun cashmere to sell. I snapped up two skeins of this lovely ivory yarn. It is 500 yards of about sport weight.

This stuff is just dreamy. It’s like knitting with clouds. I’ve never knitted with 100% cashmere before, this may be a dangerous discovery.

I didn’t think this would necessarily work for a Hitchhiker, so I pulled out another Martina Behm pattern, 22 Little Clouds.

The yarn and pattern are a perfect match. This is simple stockinette with a ruffle at the end (I guess I’m into ruffles this year!), with nothing to distract from the softness and beauty of the yarn.

As I’m sitting here knitting, thoughts of Maliknoz are on my mind. Her life is undoubtedly much different than mine, but I’d bet that she gets just a little bit of the same joy in spinning this beautiful fiber as I do in knitting with it.

Weekend Goal

I’m a believer in setting achievable goals. Finishing those socks is my goal for this long weekend.

These are for John. The yarn is Lang Jawoll superwash. It is really nice yarn, if a bit boring. It knits up into a nice dense sock fabric that will likely wear forever.

I’ll post progress reports over the weekend. The reward for finishing will be that I get to pick a lovely new sock yarn out of my endless sock yarn stash.

Endless Garter Stitch

That’s my Wool Peddler shawl. I finally finished the bazillion rows of boring garter stitch and have moved on to the lace part. Lace always seems like frosting to me. You eat the boring white cake just so you can justify getting the chocolate frosting.

It’s a pretty easy lace pattern, and in DK weight yarn (moose lace!), so it is still mostly a mindless project.

This is really squishy soft yarn, and the color is growing on me. It’s a nice neutral that will go with almost everything I own. I might not over-dye it after all.

It’s finally warming up enough around here to get outside without being bundled up in wool. We had our first brunch on the deck this morning. This is my afternoon project:

Baby herb plants! Those will get planted today.

Cruising

John and I signed up for a Princess cruise several months ago. This one leaves and arrives back at Vancouver, so we were able to drive up instead of flying, which made it a bit more economical.

It also had the attraction of four and a half sea days, which as you all know, means four and a half KNITTING days. I was very excited to see “Knitters and Natters Get-Together” on the daily program. There are a half dozen or so crafters on board, mostly knitters. We’ve been meeting every sea day morning and having a great time.

Our ports of call so far have been Long Beach, Catalina Island, and Santa Barbara. My favorite has been Santa Barbara. Catalina is lovely, but I’d been there once before so knew what to expect. Santa Barbara is a gorgeous city with miles of beach front. We were lucky enough to have a sunny day yesterday and took a trolley tour of the city.

We land in San Francisco this afternoon, and will be here all day tomorrow as well, then two more of those lovely sea days to get us home again.

I apparently am knitting all blue things. The projects that Sweetpea is helping me with up there are my Hitchhiker, which I may finish one of these years, my new lace shawl, and a pair of socks for John. I finished the first one earlier on the cruise and am well into the second one. I have a spare ball of Opal sock yarn “just in case”, but that’s likely optimistic. I also brought two spindles with me.

Here’s a photo from our day in Santa Barbara.

Old Ben is an even slower knitter than I am. He wasn’t much help.

We’re off to lunch, then an afternoon in port!

*And no, I haven’t done any yarn shopping so far.

Ahhhh–

About a year and a half ago, I started my part time work journey. A couple years ago, I transitioned from doing hospitalist work to being “just” in the clinic. That meant more work days (since those hospital days were often 12 hours or more, I “got” to do fewer of them to equal full time), but no nights, weekends, or holidays at work. I’ve missed more family Christmases and such over the years than I can remember.

In June of 2015, I went from 5 days a week to 4. As everyone predicted, I quickly filled up that time with lots of things to do.

As of January 1st, I’m dropping another day, so I’ll only work 3 days a week. Which means that EVERY week, I’ll have Thursday through Sunday off.

Today marks the start of my first four day weekend!

Maybe I’ll get some of that yarn stash knitted up before I die after all. By the way, I’m doing the “no yarn buying” this year again. I last bought yarn on December 3rd, I’m hoping to make it through 2017 without buying any new yarn.

Happy New Year!

We had a relaxing evening last night at home. We had Dungeness crab, steamed artichokes, and a salad, along with enough champagne that neither of us made it awake to midnight. Oh well. We woke up when the neighborhood fireworks started.

Today is football watching day, and then black eyed peas for dinner. Don't forget yours!

Here's my recipe:

Lorette's BEP's

1 biggish onion, chopped

4-5 cloves of garlic, chopped

Celery, about 3/4 cup chopped

1-2 large carrots, chopped

1 Bell pepper, any color will do, chopped

Olive oil

Blackeyed peas, 1 pound bag, picked over and rinsed

1-14 ounce can of diced tomatoes, drained (use the juice if you like it more tomato-ey)

Chicken stock, canned

1 bottle of beer

Splash of worcestershire sauce

Ham hock or ham shank (shank is meatier)

Thyme & oregano, a couple of teaspoons each

Bay leaf

Dijon mustard, a teaspoon or two

Salt and pepper

Cayenne, to taste. I start with about 1/4 teaspoon, and generally add more.

Saute the onion, celery, carrot, and pepper in oil in a big pot. Add the garlic when the other veggies are soft, cook for a minute. Add the rinsed peas, the can of tomatoes, the beer, and enough water or chicken stock to cover by about an inch. I usually use the tomato liquid, too. Throw in the seasonings, except for the salt. Add the ham hock and bring to a simmer. Cover and cook until the peas are done, about 45-60 minutes or so. Add salt to taste towards the end of the cooking time. Keep an eye on it, and add more liquid if needed as the peas cook.

Pick the meat off the ham bone, if there is any, and add it to the peas. Serve with cooked rice.

Here's to 2017!