Whoops

by Melissa // June 3, 2008 // 2 Comments

Well, while I’m marginally closer to finishing the project I was working on, I did not manage to avoid starting something completely different. I’ve joined the Mystery Laceweight Shawl Crochet-Along! (The group is on Ravelry but the directions are not, so everyone can play. Although I believe the wait time for new Ravelry users is down to one day, so if you’ve been wanting to sign up but were intimidated by the wait list, wait no more! Also, if you want to play along and don’t want to see it, shoo! I’m going to post a picture that’s a bit ‘spoilery.’) I’ve never made a shawl, something with laceweight, been in a crochet (or knit, for that matter) along, and I’ve certainly never done a mystery one before. I cheated a little: I didn’t join until after I’d seen a few people get through the first clue. It was pretty, and I already had a G hook out, and I realized that it would be perfect for this overdyed cashmere – although I had no idea how much yardage I had. (The shawl is supposed to need 700.) Although, looking at that blog post, it looks like I will NOT have that much. I wrote that I dyed 850 yds, and then I doubled it (so, about 425) because it was so thin and fragile. Hmm. That dampens my enthusiasm somewhat.

Oh, well. For picture,

Click the picture to see the first clue fully revealed! Intriguing, right? I guess I have a few options to deal with the yarn issue. One: Don’t make a full-blown shawl. Not a bad option, I’m not a huge fan of full sized shawls, anyway. The downside is that this is a Mystery pattern. I don’t know enough to make radical design alterations at this point. So, I could Two: unravel what I’ve done, separate the strands and work singly instead of doubled. This would have the benefit of making the finished project even thinner and lacier (possibly prettier?), give me sufficient yardage for the project, etc. Downside? Ack! Not only undo what I’ve already done, but unravel that whole spool and separate it onto two?? I’m almost sure that in some places I’ve spliced both strands together when mending breaks. That would mean cutting and re-splicing around them – not difficult, just adding a new layer of complexity to the process. Third option: I have a lot of that cashmere left, just not dyed. I could try to dye some more to finish with. 😕 I don’t feel that’s the best option.

I think that I’m going to swatch with a single strand of cashmere and see how it looks. Then I’ll know better whether option two is worth the hassle…

Inspiration in a Box (or Two)

by Melissa // May 30, 2008 // 3 Comments

We never used to do much online shopping, but you know what? I think we’re getting the hang of it. I haven’t had any projects that I’m really passionate about lately, I’ve just been doing a little busy work (although I stumbled across something fun that I’m really enjoying now – but we’ll talk about that when it’s finished) but now that I’ve gotten my mail I’ve got so many fun options that I’m barely hanging onto my project to get it finished before whooshing off to something else. I ordered my two packages about a week apart, but they showed up at the post office the same day! (Maybe they caught the same ride over?) The first was a package from Amazon that I bought as a reward for meeting a personal goal:

That’s the Harmony Guide to Basic Crochet Stitches, the Harmony Guide to Lace and Eyelets (that would be knitting), and Crochet Me: Designs to Fuel the Crochet Revolution. I am really, really excited about these. I finally caved (I’d been resisting because I almost never actually use patterns, not because I didn’t want the book) and ordered the Crochet Me book after I saw someone make the Baby Doll Dress (scroll down almost to the bottom, or just Ctrl+F Baby Doll) as a shirt. I don’t know about you, but I’m not much of a babydoll dress fan (especially one that’s crocheted…out of worsted weight yarn…) but as a top it is really cute. Let’s see if I ever make it.

The stitch dictionaries are just as exciting! I’ve already paged through them each twice and I’ve gotten too many new ideas to keep track of. Just the thought of designs I could make with this stitch or that – it’s so inspiring, and I can’t wait until I’m done with my current project so that I can attack something new with a clean conscience.

In the second package I found something very special:

It’s a brand-new wooden swift! It is so beautiful. I love it. (My children can never, never, never know that I have this, or where I am keeping it. They would break it, and I would cry.) I bought it from JoAnn’s online store when they sent out that 40% off coupon. What a deal! Now it will be so much easier for me to use my Gloss, and my Cascade 220, and that awesome yarn I bought in Colorado – and dyeing will be less hassle, and maybe now that I don’t have to keep it over my knees or around a baby gate, I’ll unravel a few more sweaters! I am jumping up and down over this. I haven’t gotten a ball-winder yet, but I don’t mind so much winding it by hand as long as I don’t have the tangles and snarling problems to contend with. I can’t wait to try this out too.

Then (because I was already ordering a package from JoAnn’s and paying for postage, and NOT adding a little something else would just have been wasteful) I ordered a little bit of yarn.

It’s TLC Cotton Plus (about which I have heard good things) and it was on sale for $2.00 a skein. That’s enough to make two large projects. YAY! I’m leaving them in their protective little baggies until I decide what to do with them – except, of course, the two little skeins that are in a bag that’s only tied, not sealed.

So. Darn. Gorgeous. I haven’t decided what to do with them yet: I may make my Baby Doll Top with the Tan, who knows? I’m also thinking that I might make the Ruffled Surplice from Interweave Knits with the Kiwi. You may recall that I bought the magazine with the pattern and some yarn for it last fall at Kid n Ewe, but it looks like (big surprise) the yarn I bought is the wrong weight. Really the wrong weight. (I am not so awesome at gauging yarn weights.) So, now I have 1200 yards of gorgeous wool/silk with no pattern attached, and a lovely summery pattern with no yarn attached, and a bunch of new, cotton-blend yarn just begging to be used.

Now that I’ve written it out, I think I will work through at least one pattern (though the urge to design something with my new yarn is strong) as a bit of a vacation. I can’t wait to play with my new toys! If only I could get that pesky project finished…

Long Weekends are Long on Fun

by Melissa // May 28, 2008 // 2 Comments

How’s that for a cheesy title? Still: this weekend we went and had some serious fun. In particular, on Monday we went out into Japan – the farthest from base I’ve been yet – to a little town where the people we asked weren’t sure they had an ATM. Why, you may ask?

Smoke! The roar of engines! Unnatural sideways motion!

Why, for an amateur Drifting Day, of course! (Don’t worry, Mom – Greg didn’t take our car out. Although he could have, for 5,000 yen!) Nothing says a good time like a dozen souped-up hobby cars on a go-cart track. Apparently drifting really is big in Japan, and it’s not just a construct of Hollywood marketing. And I have to tell you, watching it is really, really cool. I’ve never seen cars move like that. Unfortunately, it’s also pretty rough on the cars:

Seen here is one car in the process of losing its bumper. The driver just pulled off the track, took it off, and went right back to drifting. He wasn’t the only one to lose bits of his car, either (some lost hoods, front bumpers, stuff like that) but I think that was the only time something fell off and dragged while the car was on the track! We had a friend drifting that day, and he broke his fuel pump and had to be pushed off. (He quickly replaced it so he could drift some more.) Everyone was changing their tires something like twice an hour, too – one of the key elements of drifting is the burnout – and every time a car was disabled they had to clear the track and get it off before the drifting could resume.

Interestingly, they also cleared the track at lunchtime to comply with a peculiar noise ordinance: apparently there’s a local Onsen that doesn’t want to hear the noise during lunch when people come there to relax. We would have stopped anyway – stormclouds rolled in at about that time (and I mean that literally – the wind started blowing and we watched thick white fog roll over the top of the pine forest, sink down and spread across the ground) and it started raining, hard. We ran for the cars and went into town for lunch. After the rain died down, they started drifting again.

It’s really difficult to convey drifting through still photographs, but we sure took enough of them trying. They’re having another drift day in July, and we’ll probably head down to see it again. It was really a fun and interesting experience!

Oh, and I’m really sorry that the links are so hard to pick out – I haven’t finished tweaking the new blog scheme yet. Lots to do, lots to do! Also, several packages from several online orders across several weeks all converged on our PO Box today, and so tomorrow if I have time to take some pictures I will have a lot of fun things to show off. See you!

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