Socks Of Doom

I finished the socks!  The socks are done!

Today was just one of those days.  I slept on the couch because my grandmother was staying in my room.  Twelve hours, but I probably woke up half a dozen times (awkwardly turn over, go back to sleep).  I woke up feeling somewhat better than yesterday but still just... blah.

I'm taking Vitamin C supplements that are gummies shaped like orange slices.  Marketed for adults.  They're basically like candy for sick people.  It's so great.

In English I got up and started to leave when the professor was readying to hand back essays.  It's the last thing he does in class and I hadn't turned one in on Tuesday, so I figured there was no reason for me to stay.  I got to the door before I realized he was staring at me, so the entire class was staring at me.  I paused with my hand on the doorknob, turned toward him, and shrugged.  "You don't have one of mine, remember?"  He unfroze and I knew he'd forgotten.  "Ah.  Yes.  If you didn't hand an essay in to me on Tuesday, you can leave now."  I realized on the stairs I should've said, "Oh, did my fairy godmother turn in an essay I didn't know about?"  Same result, but with added laughter.

Government was pretty much a repeat class from last semester, talking about good sources versus questionable, bad, and worse-than-nothing sources.  Did you know that watching cable news networks is scientifically proven to be worse at informing the public about political issues than not watching any news at all?  It's pretty sad really.  Also one of the students asked, "What about TMZ?" and half the class started snorting.  The professor actually giggled.

Anyway, I bet you want to hear about the socks.

52 Reasons I Love You

Some things happened today!

Clue #2 of my MKAL was released today, and I got to look at the cable pattern.  I'm sort of pleased because it's as complex as promised, and sort of unhappy with it.  It's a wave pattern, not a "knot" pattern.  The cables won't spiral so much as wiggle, because the same threads of the pattern are always "on top".  Even more disappointingly (and the wiggling thing makes this twice as bad because it'll be really obvious) the socks are identical rather than mirrored.  That means, basically, that they'll both look like left socks.  I'm trying to decide whether I want to keep knitting them (as I'm already five rows in) or whether I want to frog back to the beginning of this clue and figure out how to mirror the pattern on the second sock (I think perhaps reversing the chart would work, but this requires more thinking).  I'm leaning toward frogging and reknitting, because dammit mirroring is important to me.  Identical socks are annoying.  Symmetrical socks are nice.

I'm a little OCD with my crafting.  Just a bit.

In other news, I finished something!

Tada!  It's that cowl I was working on yesterday!  It's lovely and snuggly, and it also works weirdly well as an earwarmer.  I have blue eyes and red hair, so if I put it where the blue end is around my face and the red end is around my hair, it looks amazing.  I love it a lot and will probably wear it a lot.  It's also completely flat because of the moss stitch (UK: double moss stitch), with no curling at all and plenty of texture.  Moss stitch is my favorite right now.  For some reason the "k1, p1" pattern doesn't bother me in this particular stitch.

My bread from yesterday was delicious, and I did make my soup today.  Aside from the cup of beans, I added two carrots, two sticks of celery, one small onion, one baby zucchini, and half a yellow squash.  After I cooked them in butter and oil for about a minute just to give them a little buttery flavor, I filled up my pot the rest of the way with water (I think it was a 3 quart pot?) and let it simmer a good two hours.  No need for broth, because the vegetables did it for me.  It did need salt at the end, and I should have added some spices when I cooked the veggies initially (but I know for next time).  It was delicious though.  If you don't like smooshy vegetables it would not be for you, but I happen to like them all soft and smooshy, so it was great.  I have a ton left, so I'll be eating it for lunch for the rest of the week.

Okay, time to explain the title.

Yoga And Bean Soup

Today's been a bit of a quiet day.  I got up at a regular morning time (which resulted in my mother inquiring if I was accompanying her to the park this morning; ha, ha) and pulled out my yoga mat for some sun salutations.  I haven't done that in over a year, and today reminded me exactly why I signed up for a yoga class: I love it to bits.  It's so relaxing and energizing.

I spend the better part of the middle of the day (11-3 or so) with Ian.  It's the last week he'll be here before school starts again so there were a lot of really tight hugs.  Both of us started crying at different times, which made the other one cry.  (His was really disconcerting; he just stared at me from about a pace away for a good thirty seconds before finally saying "I'm going to miss you," which is when I realized he was trying really hard not to cry and failing.)

The afternoon was quite a bit more productive.  I started making a cowl from some gradient merino handspun I did over a year ago.  It's a really nice skein and I'm sorry there's only 66 yards of it.  I dyed the fiber in five sections in ratios of red to blue: 100/0, 75/25, 50/50, 25/75, 0/100.  Those ratios don't give a perfect red-purple-blue gradient (especially not on grey and brown fiber), but it's actually gorgeous.  In the spinning and plying the transitions got even more muddled than they were already, which makes it very gradual indeed.  I'm knitting the thick-and-thin mostly-worsted yarn on 10.5mm needles, so it's pretty loose, and it's in moss stitch to give some texture.  It's turning out quite nice and I look forward to finishing.

Red, red-purple, purple, and the very beginning of purple-blue.

I also took some time to make a strap for my yoga mat, since I expect to be hauling it to school twice a week (then back into my house for practice).  I still have some ends to weave in somehow, but it looks excellent and functions perfectly so far.

I used the brightest rainbow variegated yarn ever, but held it with black to tone it down a bit.  It worked wonders!  

In addition to the fiber-type crafting I did today, there was some food-type crafting as well.  I've had a bit of a craving for both the process and the finished product of homemade bread, so I finally just went to the kitchen and did it.  I was a bit freaked out by the refusal of my dough to rise in the pan, but a bit of poking around on the internet informed me that it was probably just too cold, so I put it in a warmed (but not on!) oven and it promptly puffed right up.  See?

Card-Making Endeavors

As I mentioned earlier, my grandfather died this April.  Now that life has settled somewhat, my grandmother decided it was time to start writing thank-you cards for the dozens of people who came out of the woodwork to help and support her.

Something you have to understand about my grandmother:  She took up card-making as a craft several years ago.

The way I am about yarn, she is about cards.  She has diecutters, various types of ink, the hugest collection of stamps I've ever seen (yeah, the rubber ones like kids play with), embossing powder, ribbons, glitter.  She makes these work-of-art cards for every birthday and holiday and we just marvel.  When my aunt moved out, Grandma took her room and converted it into something like a study/craft room.  The closet is like a tiny card workshop.  It's fabulous.

But she has 50 to 100 thank-you cards to send out, so she reluctantly decided she'd save herself the work and just buy them.  So off she went to every store she could think of, looking for simple elegant thank-you cards that suited her taste.  Unfortunately, she couldn't find anything that wasn't tacky or too plain.  She could always find something to improve, and she wasn't willing to send out any less than the best.  Eventually she gave up the hunt and resigned herself to making them.  Still not quite ready to make them all from scratch, however, she found a box of 50 black-and-white patterned plain cards she could embellish, and enlisted my help.

So Thursday afternoon we planned and had a few mild arguments over the designs. (Mostly I just sat around while she tried things, and occasionally gave input on ribbons.)  Friday afternoon we really set to work, and I was smart enough to pull out my camera and take a bunch of pictures of the process to share with you.

A Gentle Jab

Tomorrow is Ian's graduation party, the next day marks four and a half years of us "being together" or "dating" or whatever you'd like to call it.  This is kind of a big weekend for me.

Because my mom sells kitchen supplies for The Pampered Chef, pretty much every viable occasion is met with some sort of kitchen gift.  There's already a stash in the garage of boxes for me.  This means that Ian is moving out with a small dorm kitchen package from my family (mostly Mom), which is somewhat colorful. Off the top of my head I only remember that the color-coated knife is green and the mini cutting board has pink edges (I insisted; Mom consented on the condition that it clearly be my fault), but I'm pretty sure there are a few other colors too.

And now there's going to be one more.  Why?  That requires a few stories:

Ravellenic Games Day Three

No one is slowing down yet!

I'm only hearing sporadically from my teammates, so I assume they're all knitting like the wind.  (Can the wind knit?)

The medal count stands now at:

WIPs Dancing (2)
Mitten Moguls (1)
Cable Cross-Country (1)
Single Skein Speed Skate (1)
Stash Skeleton (1)

Which is only one more medal than we previously had, but that medal is mine!  A WIPs Dancing medal earned for me by this lovely little fella...

Octuple Rainbow: Reminiscing

Disclaimer:  I've been reading Yarn Harlot the past several days, so this might sound a bit like her!

I can't believe we made it this far.

It seems like only a few short weeks ago you began as a little plan, an idea sprouting in my head while your sister was still growing in my hands.  Silly now to think that I originally wanted you to look like this, isn't it?

(While I'm thinking about it, Double Rainbow, I'm ever so sorry I've never gotten around to finishing you properly.  I promise I'll get back to you.)

You were never a patient one, and while you resided only in my head you kicked and prodded, urging me on while I swatched, compared colors, sketched out ideas, wondered what you would look like in the end.  Wasn't it only a few weeks ago that the plan was finalized, this picture completed?

Earth Science Hat: And I Took A Lot Of Pictures

It has all paid off.

Sketching on a whiteboard, drawing little arrows to visualize plate motion and erasing in frustration designs that didn't work.  Lists of things to include that got longer as the semester continued.  Purchasing yarn, and the adventure that is dyeing with food coloring.  Going out the day before Halloween in search of black food dye (yeah, not going to find any!) and coming home with a sampler box of twelve dyes (including black but not orange?).  Experimenting with cast-ons, realizing I hadn't built one into my yarn requirements (oops).  Starting at least four times (too many stitches, twisted cast-on, etc).  Ripping out my first efforts at colorwork again, and again, and again.  Finally figuring out some half-assed intarsia-in-the-round thing that left a few ends but looked pretty good.  Frantically altering the design as we progressed through the class.  Learning to relegate some details to duplicate stitch; learning to do duplicate stitch.

And finally, wrestling a finished hat onto a balloon (you would not believe how many balloons end up in our house...) to take pictures of it.  And I took a lot of pictures.

I think this is my favorite shot of the bunch:

In fact, it's the first one on my Ravelry project page.  I like it because it's off-center, and you can see the mostly-concentric circles my gradient yarn produced.  The tiny twinkling stars out in space are pretty darn awesome as well.

So now let's go on a tour of the rest of the hat, shall we?

Little Mischief: The Mischief Is Over!

Anyone remember this little jewel?

That's right, it's Little Mischief!  You might remember my struggles to get the math working, or the fight to cast-on the right size that led to the name.

It's due for its Big Day in just five days, and I'm glad to say that it's finally complete!

I finished the last stitch on Sunday the 8th, and immediately flung the whole thing in the washing machine with just a dab of soap.  Then it went for a tumble in the dryer and came out damp-dry, so I spread it out on the Table Of Terrible Lighting, stretched it gently so the border laid flat, and left it overnight.  But it wasn't until Thursday the 12th that I was able to sit down and trim off all the pesky little ends I'd sewn in earlier, and not until today (the 13th) could I take half-decent pictures.

Ready to see the whole thing?

Unexpected Toothy Guest

Every morning I wake up much earlier than my family. I splash some water on my face and take two hours to myself to start my morning before I have to get dressed and eat breakfast and do all the important work of the day.

This morning I stumbled into my bathroom at 7:00 (an hour later than usual) and reached out to turn on the water in my sink. Imagine my surprise when several needle-sharp teeth latched onto my little finger!

I quickly flipped on the light to better see the dark shape on my counter. I looked down and saw...