I've been having some pain in my left wrist, so I find it difficult to knit more than a couple of rows in any one sitting. I've been favoring it and waiting for the pain to go away, but it's been a while now since I felt this way, so I think I'm going to have to go to a doctor. Bummer!

I've finished the heel of my second pair of jaywalkers, and now I'm decreasing them and preparing for six mind-numbing inches of the foot. I keep forgetting to see if I can get my ankle into this pair. If not, I'll have to find SOMEBODY else to give them to. Too late, I found out that there are a couple of larger, official updates to the pattern, which can be found here. If this pair doesn't fit me, I guess I'll go up to the next larger size. I'm going to be in Poughkeepsie this weekend for Christine and Justin's wedding (yay!), so maybe I can try to get some more done on the socks while I'm traveling to and from.

Also, while looking for something else entirely, I came across a bag that I have been 95% finished with for the past two years. Everything is knitted and felted, and now I just have to sew the darned pieces together. Nevermind the fact that this bag is no longer to my exact taste, I should just be done with it, right? I think I don't want to finish it.

So I finally finished my first pair of Jaywalker socks. As you can see, they're pretty cute, even though one foot is about 1/8 of an inch longer than the other. Oh well. I need to find somebody with narrow, but long feet. Maybe I'll have to try them on the feet of all of my tall, skinny friends. It could be like Cinderella, with socks, and a lesbian subtext!
Seriously, though, I really love this yarn. It's Lorna's Laces and it is self-striping, which is the greatest thing ever! I think that the stress of the last month gave me the motivation to finish the first sock and start/finish the second one, so let's hear it for silver linings. I realized pretty early on (but not too early to do anything about it) that these socks wouldn't fit my feet, so now I am making a second pair in the larger size given, and I hope that they'll fit me! This pair is going to be magenta and white striped, which will look adorable on me!

Here are the beginnings of my new socks. I really like the way the first pair turned out, so I'll stop being so lazy and do more work on these.

Convertible Mittens

I was a little burnt out after I finished The Boy's scarf, and to tell the truth, my fingers still get phantom cramps when I think about how much knitting I did at the end of December, but I now need some mittens, and I think it's time for me to attempt some. I hate mittens, though, because you have to whip them off every time you need to use your fingers, which just sucks. I like the idea of convertible mittens, and I found a pattern that I think I understand, so I'll be attempting those soon (soon being within the month of January). I actually started them last night, but I didn't have the right size needles, and I didn't feel like being an innovator, so I ripped them out. I am interested in training myself to knit without a pattern for things other than scarves, but I don't think that this is the right project with which to begin my liberation from the tyranny of patterns.

Update: I wrote this in January. It is now August of 2008, I don't even remember starting/stopping this pattern, and there is no more Boy. So a lot has changed. But I guess this explains why I saw the tag "knitting ennui" when I went to write a new post today!

Holy Hiatus, Batman!

It's been a while since I last posted anything, but I have actually been knitting stuff. I made more booties (and then didn't photograph them, but more on that later), but the big project was the scarf that I made for The Boy. It was a broken rib scarf, and if I'd had any idea how much work that was going to be, I probably wouldn't have slacked off until late-mid December. I started it when I bought the yarn in October, but then got bored with how slow it was coming. Fast forward to the week before Christmas, when I realized that I had a problem on my hands.

How to finish without my fingers falling off? It wasn't easy. I stopped hating the pattern so much and became an automaton, and fell in love with the cashmerino yarn, which also helped a lot. I watched a whole lot of Buffy dvds until the wee hours of the morning, but I finished a whole 20-some odd hours before Christmas, so GO ME. Below, the finished product:
Wow. I just realized how horribly blurry this picture is (this may be why you're not supposed to take pictures of FOs at 3 am, after 7 hours of marathon knitting and cursing).

I finally sent out four pairs of booties that I'd been holding hostage longer than was decent. I stupidly forgot to take pictures of them (more for color variety, since they were all made from the same pattern), but one of my friends was kind enough to send me a picture of her son wearing them. This is the first time that I've seen my booties on a human. Cute! She said that he usually hates socks, but kept these on for a few hours, which tickled me to no end. I'm honored. The kid lives in the South, and it wasn't that cold there on Christmas, so I salute the trooper. The pattern is made for a baby of about six months, so they're kind of huge on him right now, but at least they'll last for a while.

Satanski's hat

After I finished the hat for EJ's dolly, I had to make one for him. I measured his head first, and the thing is 20 inches around, which is kind of nuts, but whatever. He was pretty stoked that I decided to make him a hat. He's really fascinated by my knitting, so I think I'll teach him next year when he has better motor skills. He's pretty bright.

I used the same Paton's Classic Wool Merino that I'd used for the doll's hat, but I cast on 48 stitches this time. Maybe it's overkill, but I don't know for sure until EJ tries on the hat. Sammy graciously agreed to try it on again (she's a great gal, that Sammy). I think the width is correct, but it might be too long.

I'm really proud because I finally (after two days, I know) figured out how to do the mattress stitch properly. I really liked the finished product on the hat, but now I wonder, how would the mattress stitch seam work on hats that are flipped back up on the bottom? What seam is used then? Or haven't I figured out mattress stitch to the degree I think I have? Oy. I will keep looking around and see if I can figure this out.

My second hat

So, I had such a good time making the first 1 hour hat that I decided to make one for my nephew, Satanski. I didn't want to use the crappy acrylic from the first hat, so I got some wool out of my stash. I held two strands of Paton's Classic Merino Wool together and cast on 16 stitches, since Satanski is only 2.

That was a pretty horrible idea. I could see pretty much straight away that this thing was not going to be nearly big enough, but since I'd already started, I decided to continue and make a hat for the baby doll that Satanski alternately nurtures and bludgeons, according to his mood.


Obviously, this tiny hat took next to no time to make (although it did take a minute or so of wrestling to fit it on the doll's surprisingly massive head).

My first hat

I made Allison Blevins' 1 hour hat. It took me a little longer than an hour, but all in all, not horrible for my first hat. What WAS horrible was the fabric I was using, Schoeller + Stahl's Big Ball. I originally bought it for use in a baby blanket, which I actually did make and finish. I got the yarn for the LYS, and showed the very helpful owner the pattern that I wanted to make. She suggested that I modify it to make better use of the yarn, and gave me a pattern based on the blanket I wanted to make. Unfortunately, though, my lack of spatial ability came back to bite me in the butt, because I followed the instructions exactly -- never wondering why I only had to cast on 64 stitches -- and ended up with a blanket more appropriate for a doll than a human infant. SO! I decided to make another one, and though I found more appropriate lengths for the blanket, but for some reason or another, kept ballsing it up before I'd ever gotten to a decent length.

But that was a while ago, so I forgot 1) that I had a boatload of that yarn left and 2) that I kind of hated the feel of it, because it was actually really pretty, foreign, acrylic (ugh). So I bought more, and now I have 2.5 balls of that stuff left, which, no. Not cool at all. So I used it to make a hat, which came out pretty cute, despite the cheap acrylic it was made from.

So. My first hat, as modeled by Sammy, teddy bear extraordinaire!