The Naughty, Knotty Yarn

I had a naughty yarn diet slip. I'd say it was the equivalent 'food diet' slip of frozen yogurt... a whole half gallon in one sitting. Whoops. It was the full bag sale that got me. And peer pressure. And splitting shipping costs. But I don't regret it, because the yarn is gorgeous.

Noro Silk Garden 244 from full bag sale (aka 10 balls)

You may notice that there are quite a few varied size balls of yarn there. Well, not only is this my naughty yarn, it is VERY. KNOTTY. YARN. Of the 10 balls I rewound, 8 balls had knots! I rewound each ball twice. On the first rewind, I only found 3 knots... not too bad. On the second rewind, I found 5 more knots! Of those knots, 6 knots had huge disruptions in the color scheme. Ugh. So I cut out all of the knots and got the resulting 18 balls of yarn.

Lined up by size, with naughty knots visible.

Geez Noro! What is up? Why so many knots? I know that this is a common problem, but that doesn't make it ok. Where is the QC? I'm assuming that it is a by-product of the spinning process that makes the beautiful color gradations. But tying all those knots must take a lot of time & resources. Why don't they just improve the process? Sorry... a bit of a rant there. I honestly didn't really mind the thearaputic winding and rewinding last night during the election results. Something to be said about stratigically cutting out the bad bits of something good??

Anyway, after I had all my balls wound, I tried to find a knitting order for the balls that would keep the color shifts somewhat on track. I think I succeeded. I'm going to make Lady Eleanor (ravlink) with this yarn and I'm itching to cast-on. I even researched knitting backwards and watched a YouTube demonstration. However, I really have to keep chugging away at the Christmas knitting. Someday...

I Voted.

Did you?

Socks & Sleeves.

Gift knitting continues:

And I'm bushed. That 3hr weekend-commute is killer. G'night.

Weekend at the Brown's

This weekend was relaxing. Eric was supposed to go on a boys-only backpacking trip in the Sierras but they were forecasting rain this weekend. Rain in the valley = snow in the mountains, so they decided against the outing. It did, in fact, rain, but not too much. It ended up being a beautiful weekend in Visalia! Sunday morning, while Eric went mountain biking in Three Rivers, I hung out with Alice and Ruby the dog. I took a bunch of photos. This is my favorite. 

Aren't Alice's roses pretty?

Also, last night we brewed another batch of beer. Apricot Ale. Eric recently invested in a propane stove which was fun to play with. And I'm having lots of fun playing with my camera. :)

Hope everyone had an awesome weekend!

Happy Halloween!

I went as Cleopatra. 

Judging by the responses I got, I really need to dye my hair black, cut some bangs, and get some eyebrows tattooed. Here are all the participants of Halloween fun at work:

P.S. I'm going to try to post every day this month. We'll see how that goes. :)

Sock Takes a Hike.

The holiday gift knitting continues...

This is a Retro Rib sock out of Lorna Laces Shepard Sock Solid. I am a fan of this yarn. It's sproingy and easy to knit. Not to mention, the color is fab! The subtle shade shifting is quite nice. I like. I've gotten to the heel of the first sock, so these are zooming along just fine. Yay for sneaking in some Socktober knitting!

This lucky sock got to hitch a ride on a hike to The Needles last weekend. There were beautiful vistas along the way. We could even see Mt. Whitney, which was 35mi away. Here's the sock taking in the view.

Yay!

And we mustn't forget to thank Eric for taking these photos.

Goofball.

Vrrrrrooom...

Yesterday we had a team building event at work. It was at an indoor go-kart race track! Those suckers can go 35mph so it's a pretty good thrill zooming around the track.

I'm actually really sore today. I was in a couple "crashes" and my dang bony spine got all bruised up because the seats were not very cushy. Here I am in action:

Check out more photos here.

I have been knitting. But it's all gift knitting. I have socks, mittens, hats, sleeves, and facecloths on the needles right now! It's a bit overwhelming, but little by little I'm working through the pile. Only 2 months to Christmas!

Brown and Gray.

The time of the year has come where most of my knitting turns to gift knitting. I generally collaborate with my giftees to ensure that they are completely satisfied with their gift. I would hate to spend time knitting a gift for someone if they weren't going to wear it. Usually, people have unique and interesting requests and it is fun to make things that I wouldn't normally choose to make.

Apparently this year it's all about brown and gray. Hmmm.

Of course this is perfectly fine. Look at this fine example of these beautiful colors in nature:

Heathery gray is awesome. And I love brown! But it does get a bit boring to knit brown and gray all the time. I might have to cast on something multi-colored just to keep my sanity. Endpaper Mitts??? Of course, there is always my sister's gift... I don't know how I agreed to this...

That's going to be Beatrix. Unfortunately, I had to go down to a US3 to make gauge. Gulp. Um... excuse me... I better get back to the needles.

Cause and Effect.

Cause: I bought a new camera. Effect: I had to change my blog layout.

So that I could post huge pictures. Like this:

More photos here!

P.S. Eric is minus one appendix as of last Tuesday. It was a crazy week... Why am I still up???

Swatching...

I have been swatching for my next projects and I need an opinion. Below is a swatch for a pair of Endpaper Mitts. I haven't done that much colorwork knitting, so I wanted to practice the two handed technique and see how holding the yarn in different hands affected the colorwork. I've heard rumors of yarn dominance and I wanted to prove it to myself. I didn't think it would make a huge difference, but check it out:

Top motif: Dark purple = background color, held in right hand
Middle motif: Dark purple = background color, held in left hand
Bottom motif: Dark purple = pattern color, held in left hand

So basically, the top and middle motifs are knit exactly the same way, except I'm carrying the yarn in opposite hands. Do you see how different they look! The yarn held in the left hand is definitely dominant. Check this out for another example. Yarn dominance!?! Who knew it would make such a huge difference.

Anyway, my question is, which motif do you like the best? Which color should be the background and which should be the pattern yarn? And which should be dominate? I already have an opinion, but I'm curious what other people think.

What say you?

Yarn Diet.

Hello. My name is Amanda and I'm a yarnaholic.

The time comes in every knitter's life, when the stash acquisition gets out of hand. A skein of sock yarn here, some Silky Malabrigo here, two skeins of lace weight there, souvenir Koigu from Philly, two sweaters worth of Felted Tweed... I must stop the insanity. There are so many beautiful yarns in the world and somehow... someway... I keep forgetting that I have an amazing sampling of theses fantastic fibers right in front of my face! Then a scary thing happened. I got mixed up with the Sundara crowd. They are a persuasive bunch. Always snapping up her yarn so fast that it seems like the perfect unattainable yarny fix. I want some! I NEED SOME! So I signed up for a season (or two) of her Seasons subscription. I have commited to stash enhancement of the Sundara kind until next March. This moment of weakness was the last straw. Therefore, March 2009 is my self-imposed deadline. I cannot stash any yarn until the last of my Sundara shipments are done. This is going to be hard, but I have to do it. This isn't even a financial thing. I don't mind spending my hard-earned income on fancy string. It's just the quantity is getting out of hand. I have so many awesome projects waiting for my attention in the stash. Maybe I'll finally get around to them.

I do have to make a small exception though. I'm going to make every attempt at creating most of my Christmas presents from my stash. However, if someone requests some thing that I don't have the yarn for, I can buy it. BUT THAT IS IT. The only exception. Sock yarn counts in this yarn diet. All yarn counts in this diet.

I declare this publicly only to make it more real. Sorry for the boring post. Here's a puppy for ya. Meet Winnie.

She's Jenna's absolutly adorable new pup.

Oh, in other sad news, my D40 is sick. You can actually see it in the photo of Winnie above. There is a dead pixel in the sensor just right of middle that turns in to a lovely neon green streak at low shutter speeds. So ugly. I sent it into Nikon to get fixed, but I'm thinking of upgrading to another body. Perhaps a D80? Hmmmm... another reason for the yarn diet...

Par-tay!

I had a little blocking party tonight.

I finally blocked my Good Luck Lady Sweater and I'm terribly frightened that it grew. A lot. I hope that it's just a skewed perspective on the floor that is making it look so big. Yeeks. I also finished the little yellow shrug. It was really simple and I threw in some puff sleeves to spice it up. Now I have to find a button or sparkly pin to finish it up.

The mitered mittens were a lot of fun to make. I finally figured out what the awesome handspun yarn I bought from zero wanted to be. First I tried Shag from Knitting New Scarves. I didn't like it so much... it did nothing to emphasis the yarn.

Then I tried the Morning Surf scarf that was made specially for handspun yarn. No dice. Me no likey. To stringy or something...

Finally, I turned to EZ... my first true EZ project! (One could argue that the Good Luck Lady sweater was an EZ inspired knit...) I was a bit daunted by the pithy mitten instructions at first, but I figured it out and look how pretty!

I lurve them so much!!! They are so warm and toasty. And look at the pretty color shifts!!! I will model them for you when they are dry.

Oh and real quick, a modeled pic of my Shetland Triangle:

And finally, I think it's time for a haircut. That is all. Good night!

Good Luck Lady Sweater

I did it! I finished the February Lady Sweater for the Ravelympics! However, I didn't realize that you had to post to the finish-line to get your medal. Whoops. Oh well. I'm a winner anyway!

It's ravelized here. Thanks to my sister for taking FO photos and helping to find the perfect buttons. My mom was helping with the Great Button Search of 2008 too... you should have seen us holding every possible button up to the sweater in JoAnn's. This one's too dark, these are too orange, these are too fancy... Good times.

So it is possible to knit a sweater in 17 days! Although, this sweater benefited by a cross-country flight plus down-time by myself in a Philly hotel. I'm still pretty impressed that I got it done. Also, I started another quick shrug and I'm almost done with that too! Sometimes it's fun to knit with worsted/bulky yarn! More on the shrug next time. Ciao.

Might As Well...

...ease back into blogging. I'm sorry for my suckage at blogging this summer. After awhile, if I don't post, it's just easier not to because there is so much to blog about! Enough excuses. Everyone's life is busy. So I'll get on with it. Let's start recent and go back... This is going to be photo intense and pretty random. Hit rewind!!!

I've been staying up to late watching the Olympics. Why do they have to broadcast them so late??!?! This is the state of my Ravelympics project last night. This is 6 days of knitting. Only 8 more left to finish! Yikes. I think it's doable.

Eric and I went up to Napa last weekend.

We drank wine.

I knit on my Ravelympics project.

While he raced his mountain bike.

I went to the Farmer's Market in TO last week. They had stipey eggplant! And pretty flowers.

I finished my Shetland Triangle shawl just in time to start my Ravelympics project. It's beautiful. I love it. More pics of me modeling it later.

Eric and I hiked to the top of Alta Peak: 11,204ft high, ~4000ft elevation gain by foot, 16mi roundtrip. I was hurtin after this one, but the view from up there was worth it.

We got to visit Ruby. I'm happy to report, she's still adorable.

I finished the Spring Fling socks during the Tour de France.

My sister came to visit and modeled Tessa's birthday present.

Ok, ok... I'm going to pause the way back machine for a moment... There is more to come though! So stay tuned... I'm not lying when I say I've been busy!

Oh Hai.

Ellie would like to say Hello.

She will be herding the origami partridge family I have above my desk at work. :)

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I've been on vacation! A week off work is wonderful. It was made even more wonderful by my visiting sister and bro-in-law. My dad and his gf came for a couple days too. I'm still sifting through pictures, but we went kayaking at the Channel Islands, to In-N-Out Burger and Trader Joe's multiple times, worked up a sweat at Cardio Barre, cheered on contestants during a taping for the Price is Right, hiked among the Giant Sequoias and ran into a bear, saw 4th of July fireworks, ate yummy Sprinkles & Crumbs cupcakes... we were busy! Photos will come eventually. Check out Kaylee's blog for a few pics to tide you over.

I've Got it Bad...

Startitis is rearing its impatient little head. Lately (strangely?), I've slipped into a relatively monogamous knitting habit. It's very satisfying to see rapid progress on a project when it is your sole focus.

That said, I'm now itching to start something new. I've been slogging away on the edging of the Print O' The Wave stole. I started this sucker in Aug 2007 and I'd like to finish it before it's year anniversary. The end is in sight! I've finished half of the edging...

Right now it looks like a crinkled mess, but I have faith it will become a beautiful butterfly once it gets to stretch it's wings. I can't wait to block it! I have a suspicion it might be huge...

So I made myself wait until I reached this halfway point in the edging before starting something new... but what to start?? So many choices!! I've had a cable craving lately, so I may start this cabled v-neck, Catriona.

I was surprised to see that the pattern doesn't have a chart for the cables, but it's a free pattern so I can't complain too much. I decided to make up a cable chart for my own sanity. If anyone would like a copy, I think I could share it. I don't think that violates any copyright because it's a free pattern... Can anyone shed light on that? I have some Calmer in my stash that would work really well. However, I'm not wild about the royal blue color (I was defenseless against a 50% off sale in my early knitting days). I'm also worried that I won't have enough yardage in my 6 balls of Calmer. I did a dying experiment back in the day and I like the green and purple results I got... but do I really want to dye all that yarn??? I want to knit cables now! I might research over-dying to see if that's a feasible option...

Anywho... I've been hankering to start some socks with all this lovely sock yarn I've been accruing. And tada! Knitty comes through... I'm loving the Spring forward socks and I have a perfect springy green yarn in the stash to knit it with! Sweet!

I also highly enjoy Ziggy and have some Noro sock that would be perfect... so many choices!

Welp, I'm off to cast-on something! See ya next time!

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P.S. I've uploaded a ton of photos of my recent adventures: boxer puppies, black lab puppies, high sierra hikes, fun NY weddings...