OCONUS Stash

Well, formerly OCONUS (meaning "outside the contiguous US"). Yesterday I got a box in the mail from my mom. She sent me (at my request, for a statistics project) the portion of my stash that I'd left there, in Anchorage. It consisted of a bunch of purple Lopi-Lite, some purple regular Lopi, several balls of Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Aran, some purple Nature Spun, and a bonus of two hanks of linen.


Also in the box was an even better bonus - two skeins of Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock in Black Purl, and one ball of Trekking XXL in a purply-pinky-bluish sort of colorway.


In term of actual knitting, the CM scarf is coming along - I'm almost done with the second of three balls of yarn. The grey Lopi sweater is coming along too. I'm back to knitting the yoke, and I think it will fit much better this time, with an extra repeat included. The only frustration is that there's a bit of a line where I ripped back to in the body. (I tried and failed to get an adequate picture.) I'm sure it will block out fine, but right now I'm not such a fan.

Negative Progress

This is the current state of the Lopi sweater:


Yes, there did use to be a yoke on it. In fact, the yoke had been coming along nicely. I'd finally gotten to the point where the floats were short enough I could just hold one color in each hand without having to pause to twist them. I was really enjoying the knitting, and I was loving the way the dark blue looked against the grey.


Then I tried it on and discovered that it didn't so much fit:


The picture doesn't do justice to the not-fitting of the sweater. The yoke was really much too tight, the body was stretching more across the bust than I would have liked, and the sleeves were each about an inch too short. So I frogged. I'm going to add an inch to each sleeve, as well as two stitches. For the body, I'm going to add one to two inches length-wise, and enough stitches for another patter repeat. So, hopefully within the next day or so, I'll be back to putting the pieces together again. And with better fitting this time around.

Happy Pi Day!

Today is Pi Day (3/14). I guess if you write dates the European way, Pi Day would be July 22 (22/7). At any rate, in honor of Pi Day, I had pie, and (because my knitting hasn't progressed in any interesting fashion) I'm giving you a few links about Pi and knitting ;-)

Pi Shawl - designed by Elizabeth Zimmermann, knit by Wendy Johnson
More about the Pi shawl (you'll have to scroll down)
Another Pi shawl
Knitted Pie
More knitted pie - this time it's blueberry
Pi - the Wikipedia article
The official website for Pi Day

Pi Guy wishes you a happy Pi Day!

Not "other work"

This week was my first week of classes. In the first two days, the instructors must have told us a dozen times that we aren't to do "other work" during lecture. Fortunately, it turns out that knitting doesn't count as "other work." I've knit in every class except the first one (the amount of knitting is inversely proportional to the amount of note-taking required), and I was a little worried that it would bother the instructors. I do sit in the first row, and I'm not exactly clandestine about my knitting. On Friday, though, the head of the school (who often sits in on our classes) told me that the concurrence among the instructors is that "knitting doesn't count as doing other work."

Thursday evening I finished the second grey sleeve while reading for class, so I had to come up with something else to knit in class. I needed something small, chart-free, and simple, so that I could do most of the knitting without actually needing to look at it. The solution?

A scarf to match the Cable Mittenettes!

The cables are simple, so no chart is required, and there's only cabling every fourth row, so I mostly don't have to look at it. Also, I don't use a cable needle, so that helps minimize the conspicuousness of knitting in the front row.

You'll be happy to know that the grey Lopi sweater hasn't been neglected just because it isn't my class knitting any more. I attached the arms to the body and knit several rows of the yoke. The yoke puckers a little bit, I think because the floats are so long. It isn't bad, though, and I think it will block out nicely.

So much better

Today has been as much better on the technology front as could possibly be wished. I fixed my laptop keyboard; its screen's backlight decided to work again (it had been on the fritz); and best of all, I got a wireless card and very nice new speakers for my desktop. In the computer realm, I am totally in business. I even got some knitting done (in class, but none of the teachers seem to mind). In fact, I'm making good progress on the second sleeve. I think I might even get it done this week, and that's without doing any knitting outside of class.

(The sleeve is basking in the sound of my new speakers.)

I know I've been promising the pattern for the Cable Mittenettes, but that's going to have to wait another post. I have a bit of homework to do tonight, so I need to keep this relatively short, and writing out pattern instructions in a nice, usable form is going to take more time than I have to spend tonight. So instead, I'll answer a few questions:

DPNs or two circulars for sleeves? I've never knit a sleeve on DPNs. In fact, this is only the second sleeve I've ever knit. I'm using two circulars because that's what I had handy when I started. I generally like DPNs, but I find that the large-ish metal ones are too heavy to handle easily, and I didn't have any wood ones around when I needed them. The other thing is that I like short-ish DPNs, and the sleeve gets to a circumference that wouldn't work on a four-needle set, although it might be ok on a five-needle set. On the other hand, I'm not entirely enamored of the two circular method, either. I really think I need to knit more sleeves before I can offer anything resembling an informed opinion on the matter.

So, you just moved. Have you found the LYS yet? Well, sort of. Google told me where it is (the nearest is pretty close to where I live), but I haven't been there yet. I'm sort of wondering why I need to check out the LYS during Lent when I gave up buying yarn... Of course, I do need needle for some of the lace knitting I have planned.

That Ostrich thing in some of your pictures - what is it? I'd like to tell you it's a disk filled with good knitting karma, or something to that effect, but that would be wholly untrue, although possibly more interesting than what it really is. The Ostrich was the airplane that was my senior design project. The team I was on had a deep appreciation for irony (our second choice for a name was Icarus). The Ostrich could fly 10L of water, and was the only plane in the competition (scroll down for 2005-06) to be able to fly so much. The Ostrich fuselage was rack for soda bottles, and the disk is a water-jet cutout from one of the openings. Several of us kept one as a souvenir, and I use mine as a coaster.

What do you do with those washcloths that you knit, anyway? I give them away. A few have been gifts for family, but the bulk of them I've given to the Missionaries of Charity in Washington D.C., who run a shelter for single mothers and mothers-to-be.

Piece of crap...

That would be my computer, not my knitting. I was going to give you a nice post with the pattern for the Cable Mittenettes, but then the g, h, and backspace keys on my laptop quit working and my evening was instead spent fighting with the stupid computer. grrr...

I have done some knitting, though. I started the second sleeve for my grey Lopi sweater. I would have gotten a lot further along, but I did the wrong number of rows between increase rows and had to frog about 30 rows.


I really hope tomorrow is better, at least on the technology front...