The December Sock

Very, very, very loudly the sigh drifts from my lips. This is of course after I’ve thrown a full scale temper tantrum that had I not been on a crowded bus would have involved an on the floor screaming, leg kicking, fist pounding best two year old tantrum that anyone has ever seen!  The tantrum did involve some needle throwing and some full fledged rather violent ripping.  I did manage to bite the ever loving crud out out of my cheeks to hold in the many curses that I wished to scream at the top of my lungs!  I only managed to refrain from throwing the full tantrum when I by chance glanced up from mad cheek biting and violent ripping to notice that a very good portion of the bus was staring at me.

My knitting while occasionally frustrating rarely really upsets me.  I accept that as part of knitting there is frogging this is and always will be just something you suck up and you do and you march on. There will always be bad patterns out there and even more often there will be bad pattern readers out there.  There will always be the days where you just didn’t think the rule of creating a gauge swatch really applied to you.  There will always be projects that require modification to fit your actual measurements.  Most of the time I actually try to take frogging as a learning lesson for something to do differently in the future.

But I digress back to the conniption on the bus…  What led to this little round of madness you ask?  THE SOCK or as it is now and shall forever be known as that F’ING SOCK.  I had a plan, I stuck to the plan, the plan worked like a charm!  Eleven long months of sock knitting had produced on time 5 pairs of socks and 1/2 only 1/2 of one pair of socks left to go.  I being the brilliant project manager / planner that I am was on track to finish on time no less!  I had fully planned to save one of the easiest pairs for last.  One that knit up on larger needles so that it would go quickly.

In December it began I started this little project about a week late but I knew how quickly and easily the first sock had gone and thought to myself no problem.  This sock was actually my first attempt at design and it had gone extraordinarily well.  I knew this sock like the back of my hand, no worries… and then it began:

• Frogging round 1 – I started with a larger size of needles by mistake
• Frogging round 2 - Can’t remember why this frogging round occured but I remember that it did occur
• Frogging round 3 - UNFREAKING BELIEVABLE the  F’ing sock has to be knit a very specific way from the heel and who paid no attention that’s right the f’ing planner (hence foreward known as the dumb ass)
• Frogging round 4 – Did something wrong and frogged the heel again
• Frogging round 5 – OMG kill me now this is a sock for heavens sake a SOCK why is a SOCK defeating me!!!!!  This time I finished the heel all is on track and THEN I screwed up the pattern.

This is how a grown 33 year old woman succumbs to wishing like mad that they could act like a two year old and throw a full scale tantrum.

The Finished Half of the Socks

A Room of Her Own

I was in a knitting frenzy. Don’t ask me what had come over me it was just one of those days where I wanted to knit everything in site.  And I went to it.  But then I needed my knitting guage measure; out to the living room I went.  Then I needed a different pair of needles oop those were in my room and off I went.  Then I needed to check on the previous sock that I had made.  Oop that was downstairs where I had left them to take picutres for Ravelry. 

In short I walked up down and around my house trying to get to all of the items that I needed I made so many trips that I quickly became very frustrated.  I am, or at least I thought I was an organized person prior to all of this nonsense.  This was not only frustrating I was WASTING valuable knitting time!  Simply unacceptable!  How was I going to fix this I pondered?  I stared at the accumulation of all those trips and thought to myself of all the other areas in my home upstairs, downstairs,  work bag, and car where items were stashed and <BING> the light went off!  My room yes, yes, this just might work.  I am very fortunate to have a rather large room and since I’m not married (thank you LORD!) my room belongs only to me! 

What if I cleared out a corner, if I brought this chair up?  And brought this in, I could move this around… Quickly the idea emerged and I was off to work.  A few short hours later VOILA!  So the picture below is horrible no matter what I do this room just doesn’t receive enough natural light in the winter to take a good picture.  Alas, I know what it looks like in my head…  Sanctuary, peace, serenity, I don’t get to spend enough time there but when I do; dogs at my right in the sunny spot, generally my teenager taking over my bed I find a place often yearned for, home.

Home is where the heart is.

My, what lovely balls you have

I love it! I love it! I love it!  You know what it’s like when you get a little obsessed with something???  Well having created my own Yarn Swift and then getting the new ball winder I may have gotten a little OCD… I mean just a little itty bitty tiny bit.  Getting the hang of using them took about 3 skeins to accomplish but once I had it down no piece of yarn was safe.  Dear Lord who knew I had so much stash that needed to be wound?  Every piece of leftover yarn that wasn’t in a cake somehow became one. You know you’ve got it bad when you’ve exhausted your own stash and have had to call in your other knitting buddies to bring you their stash so that it can be wound as well.  They needed nice neat pretty wound balls too don’t they?  No, really I’m not kidding… THEY DO: Lette’s Cakes.

All the yarn cakes!!!

And this isn’t even a fraction of the balls that I’ve wound! WEEE!  Anybody, else need to have some skeins wound?

The November Sock

Still on track for my year in socks Christmas planning. So far 5 pairs of socks completed on schedule. One more to go and I will have successfully completed my Christmas gifts stress level = 0%.

Berroco Foliage - November Socks

A year in socks…

Last December my Son and I were chatting and we decided that in ’08 we would like to take a cruise for Christmas.  Well cruises ain’t cheap and I’m a single Mom.  In order to accomplish this we were going to have to do some serious planning and saving.  How could we pull this off?  In order to have enough money to pay for the trip and buy Christmas gifts?

First, and foremost I established a Christmas Savings account at my companies local credit union.  One step down.  That helped garner us at least a little interest on what we saved.  I already knew that I wanted to make knitted gifts for my closest friends but good yarn is not cheap and good knitting takes time.  While at the local Barnes & Noble one night I stumbled across a book about destressing your life it mentioned that major holidays and birthdays are often a very stressful time for most folks because they wait until the last minute to buy everything.  The idea was that instead of waiting until the last minute to start planning in January.  First to make up a list of friends and relatives that you wanted to buy for.  This is the January goal just to make up your list.  Then to divide them evenly by each month and to buy that many gifts each month.  Thereby allowing you to budget more easily and buy most gifts well in advance.  So for example lets say your list came to 11 you would buy one gift each month for one person.  One in February, one in March, and so on.

Thus an idea was born!!  I decided to split up the folks that I wanted to knit a gift for and the folks I wanted to just buy for.  So in January I made up my lists picked out a yarn and commenced.  There were six folks I wanted to make a gift for so I bought one yarn each month for the first six months then knitted just one sock each month for the first six months and then did the second sock in the last six months.  This way I could make my gifts and not have to worry about second sockitis, the money, and the time.  The fabulous news is IT IS WORKING!!!!  It has been hard to stick with the plan at times but it’s August and I am well ahead of schedule!!  I am pleased to present:

January & July

Whitby

February and August

Chunky Monkey

March and September

Thuja

April

Beaded Rib

May

Mini Cable

June

Chevron Sock

It has definitely taken a lot of work to pull this off so far but keep your fingers crossed for me hopefully I will pull this all off!  Only three socks left to go….

Mashed Up

Mashup?  Heard of it?  No, not mashed potatoes (but ummm yummmy those sound good right about now)!  What’s a mashup you ask?  Well for the best description you can of course check out the wonderful Wikipedia at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_%28web_application_hybrid%29 and read up on it.  For eases sake however a mashup is a web app that combines data from more than one site.  So, if you get 5, 10, or some other ungodly amount of RSS feeds you can create a mashup from a variety of different sites (Yahoo Pipes, Microsoft Popfly, and various others) and combine them into one feed.

How in the hell does this apply to knitting you ask???  Simple I made a little knitting mashup that anyone is welcome to use: http://pipes.yahoo.com/vanderbilt/allpurledup.  I took several of my favorite knitting blogs and sites and made a little mashup of them.  Currently, I have it set so that it puts the sources name at the beginning of the post and only brings back the three most recent entries.  The sites included so far are:

• Ravelry
• Yarn Harlot
• Knitters Review
• Lion Brand
• Knit & Tonic
• Vickie Howell
• Crazy Aunt Purl
• Mason-Dixon Knitting

The nice part about this is that you don’t even have to go to Yahoo you can further subscribe to an RSS feed that get’s emailed to you or whatever else you choose.  Anywhoo, if anyone has any suggestions, for adds I’d love to hear your feedback!

The Commuter Train

Not to long ago I was laid off, when I found my new job my commute had almost tripled.  Not one to sit in my car and patiently enjoy the honking, folks flying various hand signals, and of course my favorite the folks who must love the look of the back-end of my car for as close as they are while driving 75-80 MPH.  Long story short I decided to look into the commuter train so that I wouldn’t end up as a road rage statistic.

Allow me to say that it has been absolutely wonderful!!  The cost is not only incredibly cheap but now I have the one thing I’ve never had before…  An uninterupted time to KNIT!!!  No child, no dog, no cat, no TV, no chores, nada!  Just time to relax and calmly work on knitting while chatting along with several fantastic folks I’ve managed to meet on the train.

It’s funny when I started riding the train I was the only knitter, now I’ve seen a cross stitcher (? is that the right name), a hand quilter, a crocheter, and it appears that we have a gal who is teaching some other girls to knit!  I live in Nashville, TN and so our train is nothing like the New York subways and trains one might picture.  Our train tends to be mostly the same folks spread out in three cars and while you may not actually know all of the people you begin to recognize all of the faces pretty quickly.

The only challenge is trying to figure out how to carry all of my project items plus a few spares!  So for anyone out there who has the opportunity to ride a commuter train, van, bus, or what have you I highly recommend that you give it a shot!  You might just end up with some quality knitting time….

Writer I am not…

A knitter who adores everything knitting I am!  My goal here is to add great:

• Knitting Websites
• Knitting Blogs
• Yarn Sites

or anything else cool that I can find!  To that end I’ll start out with one of my faves!

Fiesta Yarns – http://www.fiestayarns.com/html/2/index.shtml – If you haven’t seen their yarns you are truly missing out.  This is one of my all time favorite yarn brands.  Their yarns should be a sin they’re so delicious.  I have often bought one of their yarns and sat on it for months waiting for the perfect pattern to surface before I will break it out for use.

As a matter of fact I’ve been stashing 2 skeins of Raspberry Mocha Rayon Boucle for well over a year now.  I am in love with it if only the brilliant pattern would surface so that I could put it to use!

Well that’s all for now hopefully something more inspired next time.