So, Greg asked me the other day…

“…so, do you like knitting now better than you like crocheting?” I took this as my cue to crochet something again. (The answer, by the way, is no, knitting is just still really new to me and I have a LOT to learn, which is a really engaging challenge. Plus, when I crochet, I design. It’s like I can’t help it.)

I pulled the sheepghan out of the closet again and slogged through the charting issues (by ignoring my previously worked-out chart and just putting the colors in the places I wanted them). My reward?

Wow. That’s actually looking pretty great. And sure, great is subjective, but it’s looking a lot like I meant it to, which is great to me. However, as you may or may not be able to tell from the darkish photo, I’m going to have a gazillion ends to weave in. Way, way more than the cotton top. Way, way, way more. I think the next church-baby afghan will be markedly simpler.

Oh, by the way - I figured out why Knit Picks sent me those color cards….they introduced new colors in both of those yarns and were trying to get rid of the old ones! The sneaks. However, I’m not complaining, because the new colors are all heathers and I love a good heather. It’s actually my favorite sort of coloring. I love them. Seriously, if I name my first-born daughter Heather it won’t be because of the flower. (I kid. Maybe if I ever get a cat it’ll be a Heather.) Um. Where was I?

My point is, I like heathered yarns.

Just in case you’ve been holding your breath

…since April? (Oh dear. You’ve died, haven’t you?) Anyway, you can now get the directions for the snake ’sock puppet’ here.

I tried to write directions for two larger sizes, so if anyone actually tries it out, do let me know how it goes!

FO Bonanza!

In my blogging absence, I’ve finished a few things. For instance, Charlie’s mittens:

Which are currently too big (and he doesn’t think much of them, besides), but we’ll be going to Japan when he’s about 18 months. Max thinks they’re awesome. Which is good, because he’s slated for a pair, too.

Also, the cotton top!

Which came out pretty well. It took less than 7 balls of the cotton (I’m not sure if it took less than 6, though, as I was using two balls at once for the top part). Seriously, though, people, I was weaving in ends for two days. Like I said, I like it, but it came out a little…strange…in the sleeves and the neck. The back is also slightly less wide than the front so it fits oddly. The sleeves keep curling under even though I did a row of single crochet around them. I haven’t blocked it or ironed it or anything like that yet, though, so I think they’ll improve with some encouragement. Still! Not bad! Especially given my lack of technical expertise and my tendency to fudge over my mistakes instead of correcting them. I’d even go so far as to say it’s kinda cute.

One more thing and then I’ve gotta run: I knit a finger puppet today.

I made it for Max, for use as a prop during Family Home Evening. In case you can’t tell (:oops: - although really, how would you know?) it’s supposed to be Nephi. You can read the story we’re going over tonight here and here.

Gotta go! I need to pick up my plaster-handed husband from work.

Ok, so APPARENTLY

…no matter how many projects you have going at once, you still only get sort of the same amount of progress done. Crud. Looking at my list of things to do and to make, that is sort of… daunting.

Also, my camera pretended it was blind for a good long time this morning, but then decided that not only was it not quite dead, but in fact it was feeling much better and wanted to go for a walk. So I have pictures. But it’s probably time to start setting aside money for a new camera. Sigh.

As you can see, Charlie’s mittens are almost finished. Yay! And here’s a new pic of my cotton top:

Which has made progress since the last photo but none at all since I began the mittens. Which makes no sense at all. If you take more on, you’re supposed to be able to get more done, right? I could swear that I read that somewhere…

Knit Picks Shipment!

Yaaaay! (The package tracker said it wouldn’t be here until Monday. Woohoo!) I bought enough for free shipping, which equals a LOT of yarn. Don’t worry, though, each skein of it is tagged for a project. For instance:

2 skeins of Gloss in Cocoa. These will become a pair of Baudelaire (for me).

2 skeins of Gloss in Dusk. These will become a pair of Hedera (for me).

4 skeins of Swish in Deep Ocean. This will become a sweater for Charlie. (See how Deep Ocean goes with the Sea Blue Stripe?) Maybe a Sherwood.

5 skeins of Swish in Dublin. Probably a Sherwood for Max.

3 skeins of Merino Style in Crocus, Harvest, and Strawberry for a design of my own. It was on sale!

Also, something I’ve heard of but never experienced:

Complimentary color cards. Wow. Telemark and Palette. I already have Palette, but that just means Max gets to play with it. (He’s thrilled.) Mom thought I was crazy when I bought all of those color cards, but when I went to place my order, I knew exactly what the colors looked like.

My review: all of these yarns are gorgeous! Both to touch, and their colors. I’ll give better reviews when I use them.

Busy, busy, busy

Well, I’ve been really busy lately. Since Greg broke his hand, that means he can’t drive. Therefore: anywhere he needs to go, I drive. Needless to say, we’ve been out of the house a lot over the past two weeks. I’d like to apologize to the great number of people waiting for replies from me. However, I have done a bit of knitting (in the car. While waiting, not driving). Since we’ll be moving soon (to Japan), in the winter, to a place where it actually snows (Japan) I thought it would be fun to start making cold-weather gear for the family. You know. For snow (in Japan!). I started with Charlie, as he’s the smallest.

Mittens! How cute is that? Little, bitty, stripy mittens. I cast on for the second one instead of finishing the thumb on the first because I was at the perfect spot in the color repeat to have matching stripes on both of them. Pretty sweet, huh? I’m using Ann Budd’s basic mitten ‘recipe;’ in Lion Brand Magic Stripes on size 1s. Max is due for a similar set, and I’ve ordered some yarn to make each of them a sweater. Lemme tell you, this is gonna be fun.

Progress Report:

Let’s see now. Blue cotton top:

Progressing. I think I’m on my fifth ball of the cotton. I’m not sure. As you can see, I stopped the ribbing just under the bust and am putting in some short rows. It fits nicely!

Also, you can buy the Sweet Cocoa Cloche pattern here!

Aaaand the pattern for the Macaw hand puppet is sort of coming along.

In other news, Ravelry is fun!

Lemming the Good Life

My friend Bezzie recently wrote on her feelings about bandwagons. (She’s against them.) I used to have that sort of clear-cut opinion on them, too. In fact, I had the same one. That would kind of put us on the same anti-bandwagon bandwagon, wouldn’t it? The ironic thing about being anti-bandwagon is that there are a lot of other people who feel the same way. I think that when you base your behavior on what other people are doing or not doing - even if it’s to do the opposite - you’re moving with the herd. Even if your herd is the anti-herd, composed entirely of black sheep. Then the black sheep isn’t unusual, is it? It’s surrounded by other black sheep.
Not (just to clarify) that I think Bezzie is an anti-herd sheep. I haven’t noticed flocks of other knitters making plastic bag raincoats or skirts out of business cards or knitting their own action figures. But. Given the topic of her musing and my own previous anti-herd sheepiness it’s almost embarassing to announce that I got my Ravelry invite last night.
Of course, my new approach to things is not to judge something new on what others think of it, but on my own perception of its merits. Sometimes this means doing something that a lot of other people are doing, other times it means doing something no one else is. I think that’s the healthy variance known as ‘personality.’ I wasn’t aware of the hype surrounding Ravelry until recently (I think it started as more of a knitting community thing). I read about it on Kim’s Crochetme blog and it sounded cool. Do I get points for doing the same thing as everybody else for a different reason? Ah, well. If you’re already in Ravelry, too, you can be my friend.

The Details!

So. As I mentioned, we’re moving to Japan. If you’re puzzled or shocked by that, perhaps this will help clear it up: Greg is in the military. Aaaaaah. Yup, that’s why. We’re really, really excited. We’re supposed to go in February, which seems like ages away, although I know that it’s really a short time to prepare for and execute a transoceanic move. We have to sell our car. (Well, we don’t have to, but if we don’t we’ll be shelling out some $$$ to bring it up to code. So we’re going to sell it and buy another one over there.) We have to sell our house. We need to sell Greg’s motorcycle. (Same deal as the car.) Greg was actually in a low speed motorcycle/car crash a few days ago, so we no longer have to sell 2 bikes. (Greg is doing very well, his worst injury consists of 2 bones broken in his left hand. We have been very, very busy since then.)

We got the Rosetta Stone program to begin learning Japanese. It’s fun, it’s not that hard, and we hope to be intelligible by the time we have to be in the country. We’ve spoken to some people who used the same program and they said that it’s a good program but it didn’t give them the basic conversational Japanese they needed to get started. I can see that, but it gives such a good base of grammar and vocabulary that I’m going to keep using it. Traveler’s phrasebooks cover that other stuff.

I had a really interesting experience yesterday, though: Max’s speech therapist came over for our session. We had the following conversation:

Me: “Oh, and we got orders this week - we’re moving to Japan!”

Her: *gigantic gasp, shocked facial expression* *double take* “…You’re smiling?”

“Yeah, we’re really excited about it!”

“Wow. That’s so far away!”

“Yup. Yup, we’ve been reading everything we can get our hands on about it though, and talking to people. We even got this program and we’re starting to learn Japanese!”

“Japanese, that’s just a series of grunts, right?”

Pause. “What?”

“Yeah, Japanese, that’s just -” (lowering her voice) “grunting?”

“Um. Noooooo, I wouldn’t really call it grunting.”

“Oh.”

“I mean, it’s kind of percussive, I guess, because they’ve got the consonant - vowel - consonant - vowel sound pattern, but I don’t think you could call it grunting.”

“Oh. Well, I haven’t really had any experience with it.”

“Mmmhmmm…”

So that was interesting. She’s an educated person! But it turns out that she’s only been out of The Great State of Texas 3 times (once when she was 4 years old) and her world doesn’t extend much past its borders. (I made a comment about how long it takes to travel through Texas and she responded by saying, “Yeah, I’ve heard that once you get outside it goes really fast, like from state to state?” That one I could confirm for her. I have to wonder what she would think of, say, Iowa. Or Vermont!)

Crafty content coming up. We’ve just been insanely busy with other things.

Scratch That.

I seriously doubt we will be painting the walls now.

We’re moving to Japan!