I think I have a problem.
All posts by peneloping
Temptation
Guess what is sitting in my backpack next to me, 99% finished save for stitching completely finished sleeves onto the body and smirking at me because I have 3 more hours until I can go home from work? Yup, that would be Aidez.
I felt like such an idiot on the subway this morning. Usually when I work on projects I’m spread out over at least 5 square yards of space and it looks like a tornado hit. This morning as I sat on the subway, I was attempting to slip stitch my finished knitting pieces together (do I mean slip stitch or am I having a brain fart?) while keeping all three pieces on my lap and not poking the people squashed up against me on either side as I pulled the plastic needle straight upwards repeatedly through the seams.
Good thing I was too tired to care, and the nice gentlemen on either side of me were passed out and didn’t notice when I accidentally flicked loose yarn bits at them.
Tonight I’m finishing this sweater*, and tomorrow I’m going to San Diego!
Hopefully somewhere in between there I’ll be able to squeeze in some photos.
*Perfect timing too, since the new yarn I ordered from Knitpicks gets here on Saturday and I’ll be officially “allowed” to start a new project!
But more on that later.
More squishy.
Guess what I’ve been doing all weekend? If you guessed “Sneezing into a mountain of tissues”, “lying pitifully and feverishly in bed”, or “coughing up a lung”, you were right!
Fortunately this gave me an excuse to knit like a fiend.
I love love love this yarn. It’s so squishy. And soft. And this pattern is gorgeous! And surprisingly quick. I’m already on row 23. (We’re going to ignore the part where I had to rip out 15 rows because I messed up the decreases.)
Ok, that’s all I have. Back to lying down now.
-sniffle-
Pretty procrastinations
Lately because I spend so much time at work I end up feeling icky if I don’t make inordinate amounts of progress on various projects on my days off. This usually results in my whipping out Peaks Island to squeeze out a couple of rows whenever Boyfriend says “Hang on, I just want to check my fantasy baseball league real quick*.”
That said, this weekend was kind of a huge wooly mountain of productivity.
It started with a Joann’s trip. I have yet to find** a nice local yarn store in my area so I always end up going to Joann’s. And also Joann’s (avec coupons) is way nicer to my bank account. And this time I had a 25% off entire purchase coupon that was about to expire.
I only meant to buy two more skeins of Wool-Ease in seaspray***, but somehow I ended up with an additional two skeins in blush heather (I decided to go with a pale heathered pink for the booties), and then two skeins of the Chunky Wool-Ease in wheat for a new project.
Yes, my instant gratification project of the weekend was a long cable-y sweater. You know what though? In about a cumulative day’s worth of knitting, I’ve finished the entire back piece and cast on the left front piece. I love this yarn. Except that it’s mostly acrylic.
And yet, somehow I still feel that icky un-productive feeling.
You know that feeling when you have two papers to write and 200 pages to read and an exam to study for so all you want to do is clean the house even though normally you hate cleaning?
That’s kind of what happened with my knitting projects this weekend. I sort of have a Super Secret Side Project going on with a fast approaching deadline coming up**** and instead of working on it like I had originally planned to do this weekend, I kind of half-assedly finished one part of it Friday morning and then ignored it all weekend.
I even decided to attempt my first-ever crochet project from a pattern. Ignore the lumps please.
The moral of the story is that my car is out of gas so after work I’m going to drive over to the gas station to fill it up and on the way I’m going to stop at Joann’s***** for more chunky yarn. It’ll be my way of bartering with myself. “For every panel of chunky sweater you finish, you HAVE to do one section of the Super Secret Project.” I don’t see any flaws with this plan. Not one.
Speaking of which, this Aidez sweater is absolutely delightful to knit. The cabling has enough variety to be interesting but it’s not so complicated that I have to check the pattern every row. In fact I even managed to memorize the pattern after several rows.
Lastly, want to hear something really stupid? Like, ridiculously stupid?
<shame>
I’ve been using markers incorrectly. Until this weekend. For some reason unbeknownst to me, I’ve mistakenly been under the impression that markers are hooked into your knitting and that there’s some technique of knitting through a loop that somehow transfers the marker to the next loop. In fact I’ve been meaning to look up that technique and have been either not using markers, or just moving them to the top every ten rows or so. Why I never thought to slide them directly onto the needle between stitches is completely beyond me.
</shame>
*Last time “real quick” consisted of a fifteen minute phone call with a friend in his league and then over an hour of poring over my laptop.
**Re: venture out and look for.
***I’ve been calling it seafoam but it’s actually called seaspray.
*****These two places are not even remotely close to each other.
Distractions.
It’s Thursday! Which is my Friday. Which means that while I’m physically still at work, my mind is already taking a day off.
I’m being torn in two by the prospect of free time. Part of me is relishing the idea of cozying up in bed with Beatnik, Little Birds, and Peaks Island (oh dear lord, I’ve started to refer to them as though they were people..). That part is imagining steaming mugs of hot chocolate and pajamas being worn all day.
The other half of me is imagining speeding off to Jo-anns with the coupon they just emailed me and attacking the yarn section with it. This is the same part of me that just bought two patterns from KnitPicks. Specifically, this one and this one. In my defense, I’ve been looking for a nice bootie/slipper pattern on Rav for ages and have only ever run into booties for babies, which, while they are adorable, could really only fit my big toe and are therefore useless. And the bag is really cute. -squee-
And technically the slippers are crocheted, which isn’t even knitting, so it doesn’t really count as cheating on my current projects.
I guess I’m going yarn shopping.
Hmmmmm now I just have to decide what color to do these in. I’m thinking of doing the bag in a baby blue/lime green combination but I can’t decide if that’s too cutesy/springy for my wardrobe. And I have absolutely no idea what color to do the booties in. Oh well, I guess I’ll just have to make eight pairs in different colors. (I’m only half-joking.)
In other news, I went to Border’s last weekend determined to buy a knitting book but left empty-handed because I had no idea what to get. Any suggestions on must-have knitting books? I’m not really looking for anything specific, just anything with nice patterns or good tips.