Cables for the sake of Cables…

ARE allowed.

So anyway, my “nearly completed” crocheting project and I are currently Not on Speaking Terms (I tried to love you, really I did - why did you have to become inexplicably ugly on assembly?), and so I gave in to the urge and picked up the needles again. I wanted cables. Not just cables, of course, I have this thing against making things with neither point nor purpose. So it had to be a cabled something. Not a sweater - too big, I just need a quick fix - not socks (I don’t want to worry about shaping, just the cables), not, for heaven’s sake, a scarf (see above qualms about pointlessness). Then it came to me - a shrug. Now, I hate shrugs. Well, I did. I still do hate some of them. The ‘acceptable shrug’ is a fine line to walk, but it was exactly what I wanted in terms of a project - more likely to be worn than a scarf, a ‘wearable’ without the commitment of a sweater, and best of all, a rectangle which required no shaping whatsoever (perfect for cable-y goodness). Anyway, enough talk, I’m going to show you my swatch.

Isn’t it lovely? The center motif is a Celtic/Saxon Braid, which I love, bounded by two big, fat braids. Super fun! It’s gratuitous cabling at its best. Now, swatching was always the plan, and it’s a good thing, too. I estimated the number of stitches I would need, according to the gauge listed on the yarn label, but I forgot (hey! I’m a noob knitter. Give me a break.) that cables scrunch the work horizontally. It’s where they get their poofy goodness. So, that means that now I can add some more gratuitous cables on the outside of the braids to reach the correct dimensions in the actual attempt on the shruggery.

I did something else unexpected today. I actually felt dirty afterwards. Really, truly, dirty - oh, wait, that was actual dirt. Moving on. I went trash diving. I’m not an experienced trash diver, but not above seizing something I stumble across. My alert next-door neighbor knocked on my door this morning to tell me that some people nearby were moving, and had left something at the trash pad that she thought Max and I might want. Take a look:

She meant the table, of course. The cooler was a bonus. They’re both in fabulous condition (I checked before I hauled them to my patio). I mean, the little table isn’t even FADED, a minor Texas miracle for something that has obviously been an outside toy. Both are dirty, of course, but dirty washes off.

Seriously, though, I was looking over my shoulder as I carted off my loot, hoping I was interpreting the stuff’s position among the trash cans correctly, and that there would be no ‘Stop! Thief!’ behind me…

Happy Bloggiversary, happy bloggiversary…

…happy bloggiversary, haaaaaaappy bloggiversary! I’ve been blogging for a year! Hurray! In honor of the occasion I am pleased to present the Gallery of Finished Objects, available now for your viewing pleasure. It is not yet up as a link on the sidebar, but it will be - um, as soon as I…can. There you can find a picture of EVERY (almost every) finished object I have completed since late 2004, complete with a small blurb about the project and, where available, a link to the pattern whether it be free or for sale. That was kind of fun, going through all of my old pics and posts, finding information and dates and stuff.

At any rate, I am ALMOST finished with my current crocheting project, which slid into the UFO category after being neglected for over a month. It’s the last in a small collection of for-sale patterns (do you realize I haven’t added a sale pattern since last fall? Sheesh.) that should be fun. I seem to have a knack for designing toys…

ETA: Look, I’ve had over 60,000 hits in this year - that’s more than 1100 hits a week, averaged out. Hi, everybody!

Whew! Glad that’s over…

Not that knitting the sweater was unpleasant. But as I got closer and closer to the end, I started thinking about what I would tackle next. So along with the growing urge to run off and pick up one of my various works-in-progress, I was beating off ideas for new designs with a stick. (Seriously, I had to draw them out in my sketchbook before they would leave me alone!) It got even worse once the actual knitting was finished and I had cast off. Then I blocked it (and I totally understand the knitter’s obsession with blocking now, there’s no way that stockinette would behave itself without the application of steam and a hot metal plate), wove in the ends, and seamed it. I was almost sweating with the effort it took to keep focused long enough to hand-sew the little cloth ties and sew them on. (It took me all day yesterday to do that one step.) But I stuck with it, and it’s beautiful! Look!

Of course, now that it’s completely finished, including photographic documentation and posting about it, I have no idea what I’m going to do next.

Knitting for Pelé

Yeah, I’ve been knitting again. I decided to make something else for the future soccer superstar using my womb as a practice field. Turns out that my local library does carry craft books, although not too terribly many (or of recent publication). One that did catch my attention, though, was Simple Knits for Cherished Babies by Erika Knight. I don’t know what it was about it that made me check it out. Possibly the key lies in the use of the word ‘cherished.’ It’s a lovely word, with lovely connotations, and it’s one that you don’t often hear these days. That, combined with the tempting ‘Simple’ proved too much for me to resist, and it went home with me. Having said that, I will tell you that it is actually a good book. Not a great book in terms of pattern creativity, but I would buy it. At a yard sale. Or perhaps a thrift shop. Even my local used book store (if I had one). I would place a seven-dollar value, tops, on its pattern-stash value. And I have a rampant case of PAS (pattern-aquisition syndrome).

I picked out a simple sweater suitable for my little boy (there are a few yummy options for girls, but…well…) and I studied it out. I’m no fool (at least, I don’t think so): I realized that my first knitted sweater would probably challenge me. At any rate, first I had to find a substitute yarn for a ‘medium’ cashmere yarn. Yeah. Cashmere. (Apparently ‘cherished’ = ‘rich.’) If I’m not wearing it, I’m certainly not going to dress my baby in it. Sorry, kiddo. A simple gauge swatch, however - something unprecedented in my knitting - revealed that Bernat Softee Baby would be a good substitute. Well and good. It looked like a simple project, a pullover sweater, just knit up the front, add stitches for the arms, go around the neck, reconnect and knit down the back. Something like that would be a piece of cake for me in crochet. I suppose I didn’t think about what, precisely, that would entail with knitting needles. I’m almost finished now, and I want to show off, so I’m going to show you what I’ve got before I continue talking about it.

So, just for this project, I have so far knitted a gauge swatch for the first time, learned how to cast on extra stitches after I’ve already started, learned how to split my stitches and work two balls of yarn at once (that was a doozy of an evening), and, of course, there was the happy day when I went back to a single ball of yarn. (Yay!) I’m on the home stretch, and soon I will have completed my first knitted garment ever!

Here’s a shot of the sweater, studying to be a better sweater. I crack myself up sometimes.

In crocheting news, my sweater Genevieve has moved to the first round of testing with the help of the fine ladies at Crochetville! I’m very excited about getting it going again, it was kind of stalled for a while. Hopefully I’ll have another pattern or two go into testing in the next few weeks. It makes me happy.

Oh, and I try to keep my bloglinks to the right full of blogs that are actively being updated with cool stuff, so check them out! There are some new faces in the lineup.

Extra, extra!

Oh, dear…what an embarassing expose… Click to read.

To make your own newspaper snippet, go here. Discovered by following a link from the CrochetMe Blog to Mason-Dixon Knitting. Too cool.

In other news, at the request of attentive reader AnnMarie, I will reveal to you my huge crocheting blunders. Read ‘em and weep. Or giggle. Whatever.

1) I was crocheting every stitch through the back loop only, coming from the back. So it made little ridges, but not the big poofy yummy ridges you get from doing BLO correctly. It looked funny, not at all like what I saw other people were doing, and the discovery that I was supposed to crochet through both loops unless directed otherwise was quite a breakthrough. (My mother claims she tried to correct me at age ten, but I was too pigheaded. Moi?)

2) Um. Apparently, you’re supposed to hold your yarn *behind* your work. Oh. Really? Now, I realize that it is much more difficult to hold it in front of your work (seriously) but it was easy to attribute this sort of problem to inexperience, and I actually got quite deft at it. Once I had the hang of it, I would have been able to chalk any differences between my technique and someone else’s to the natural ‘mirror effect’ of looking at a righty’s work when I am left-handed. (Of course, my mom was not a hard-core crocheter at all, only breaking out the hook about once a year…or once every couple of years, whatever. Plus I took a crocheting break from about age 12 to age 18 or 19. It was easy not to notice.) Correcting this also made pulling loops through MUCH easier, and also reduced the amount that loops just fell off my hook.

And then, of course,

3) Once you are holding your yarn behind your work instead of in front of it, it becomes pretty obvious that you ought to poke your hook from front to back instead of back to front.

All of these corrections have resulted in faster, prettier, less-stressful crocheting for me. Yay!

Down Memory Lane

Well, it’s May now. My 1-year bloggiversary is coming up at the end of the month - yay! A post at Crochetville asking about the first time we used a pattern prompted a scramble through my pile of digital pictures, and it was so darn cute I had to post it on the thread. I’m posting it here again…because it’s my blog, and I can.

Isn’t it cute? Cute and terribly blurry? That sweater fits Max a little snugly for being a 6 month size, don’t you think? The sweater was the first thing I made for serious when I found out I was pregnant…about two years ago. Then the booties, then the little rippleghan barely visible on the left, each with progressively better results.

I said that the sweater was my first project made from a pattern ever, but upon thinking about it I realized that I had made a hat and bootie set the summer before (so 3 years ago) from a pattern. Funny, they were also sized for a 6 month old, but I doubt whether Max’s head is big enough for it yet. RHSS is a baby yarn, right?
So many landmarks…only a year and a half ago, I realized the gross crocheting error I was making that made all of my projects turn out not looking quite as ‘nice’ as the ones I saw other people making…just nine months ago my first crocheting pattern was published in CrochetMe to my intense glee. It was about 6 months ago that I realized another, much smaller technical error that I was making (correcting all of these mistakes has made my crocheting turn out soooooo beautifully that sometimes I just sit there and pet what I’ve made because it’s so purty. :grin:), and of course, it will only be one year this summer since I wrote my first-ever pattern.

Maybe someday soon I’ll get to work with some wool, or even alpaca!
And guess what? Totally random, but apparently I’m Elinor Dashwood…

You scored as Elinor Dashwood. As Marianne’s older sister, Elinor lives at the other end of the emotional spectrum. She rarely reveals her intense feelings and is more concerned with being honest and loyal than having what she deserves. Even though her intentions are pure, she sets herself up for loss by constantly placing other people before her own needs. Overall, Elinor is gentle and rational but is just as capable of radical emotions (despite her withholding them) as her sister.

Which Jane Austen Character are You? (For Females) Long Quiz!!!
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