Tag Archives: knitting

Pretty procrastinations

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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.

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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.
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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.

****More on this later.

*****These two places are not even remotely close to each other.

Mysterious.

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I have no idea where these knitting needles came from.

I had been oggling Ysolda Teague’s Peaks Island Hood pattern for weeks (actually I’ve been oggling most of Ysolda’s patterns for weeks) and finally caved and bought it. Three of the projects I’ve been working on lately have been sweaters and I needed some instant gratification (well, not instant, but instant-er than a month).

After waiting impatiently for the file to download (three of the longest seconds of my life), I opened it up and read through what I needed. At first I was going to splurge and buy some of the Green Mountain Spinnery yarn that she used, but then I realized that I don’t really need a $52 scarf. I might buy some anyway though, that stuff looks delicious.

I dug around my stash and found some Lion Brand Wool-Ease that I had bought during a yarn sale (because it’s so expensive to begin with) because it was pretty. The color is called seafoam, and it just screamed at me to be made into this scarf/hood. I took another look at the pattern. US size 10 needles. I was positive I didn’t have any in that size. My knitting needle collection is pretty sparse. I hadn’t really started knitting until recently so I pretty much just have single pairs of needles that I grabbed off the shelf because they looked about right. I decided to take a look anyway so I could pick up a few other sizes I might need for the upcoming projects in my queue.

And somehow there, sticking out the side of my knitting basket, was a pair of size 10.5s.

I’M SO CONFUSED.

When it comes to sewing stuff I have so much it’s hard to keep track of and I’m always running into things I had forgotten I owned, but not so with the knitting stuffs.

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Anyway, I’m not really asking questions. I decided that 10.5 is close enough to 10 so I cast on and now I’m about five inches into the 27 inches of seed stitch. (The above photo was taken about 25 rows ago.) Yay for happy mindless knitting!

In other news, I posted some Jayne Cobb hats in my etsy store. Feel free to check them out and, you know, buy one. 🙂

Chirp.

orange
Call me weird but yesterday I came home from work and immediately developed a huge craving for oranges. I peeled a bunch of clementines and broke the sections apart and stuck them in the fridge for a bit. I guess I won’t be getting scurvy anytime soon.

In other news, it’s my weekend!

I was so excited about finally getting to the color-work portion of Little Birds that I somehow got through a whole pattern repeat last night. This sweater is actually coming along pretty quickly now that the ribbing is done.

I’m a little rusty on colorwork so the birds aren’t as pretty as everyone else’s pictures on Ravelry. Or maybe it’s just the fact that I keep holding it two centimeters from my nose and inspecting it for mistakes.
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Aren’t they cute though??

Little Birds

I should also mention that I have absolutely no idea if I’m doing this right. I’m also terrified of the steaking part but we’ll cross that bridge in about four bird rows.

I might take a break from this in a bit to work on Beatnik because it’s been neglected for at least a week now.

Lastly, I’m pretty sure I’ve been spelling Ysolda Teague’s name incorrectly (with an “I”) up until today.

Sometimes I’m really stupid.

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I have a confession to make.

For the past week, I’ve been bringing my knitting along with me to work so that I can have something to do on the 25 minute subway trip.

And for the past week, I’ve marched over to the subway stop, all excited for pre-work happy knitting times to start the day, until I step on the subway, sit down, and decide that there are too many people who would look at me funny and that I’m just too self-conscious to pull out my knitting.

Cue 25 minutes of playing Cribbage on my phone and telling myself that card games are better than yarns anyway.

Stupid, right?

Well, today I decided to stop being stupid. I slid into an empty seat, glanced around and noticed that everyone was staring blankly into space with huge Monday bags under their eyes, and whipped out my knitting project and clicked away for 25 minutes.

Of course, this sudden burst of confidence could also be explained by the large portly man who sat next to me, essentially blocking me from everyone’s view. 🙂