Wednesday, December 19, 2007
I finished something! And oh my god they're not socks!
What: Tunic sweater avec turtleneck, pattern is my own
Yarn: Malabrigo worsted in Azul Profundo #150, less than 3.5 skeins
Needles: US8 and 7 circulars and dpn's
There's this sweater I got for cheaps at H&M that I have been wearing to the ground. It's black, made of soft squishy acrylic, the length of which hits just past the hips. It's body-hugging and has a large cowl-neck that could be stretched and draped over both shoulders, revealing the collarbone, or slouched just to one side, revealing just a tantalizing snippet of a neck. It is a totally simple sweater but when I wear it, I feel like if I opened my mouth to speak my voice would be husky, I might even purr, and everything I said would be witty and charming because it would also be in French.
My version of that sweater is a little less Euro and a lot more...BLUE. I cannot tell you how intense the blue really is. I used just over 3 skeins of Malabrigo and it turns out they were all pretty much consistent in color, except for that one lone skein which of course appears smack dab in the middle of the sweater. Whatever. I'm fine with it.
Because I didn't follow a pattern and I wanted it to fit a certain way, I actually swatched before starting this sweater. This is a first. I never swatch. I get lazy. Most of the time it works out, sometimes it doesn't. But in true me fashion, I've misplaced all my algebraic scribbling and notes so I can't tell you the gauge I came up with. It wasn't rocket science anyways. Basically I wanted a sweater that was about 30 inches around, using US8 needles. I also put in waist shaping in the form of darts: instead of decreasing/increasing at the end of each side, I did it about 2 inches in from each side.
I yoked the upper body part: when reaching the armpits, I bound of maybe 10 stitches for the armpits on each side, set the body aside and started knitting the sleeves separately, in the round on US7 dpns. When I was satisfied with the length (up to armpit), I bound off for the armpit and joined the sleeves with the body, and continued in the round. Standard yoke stuff. Decreased every other row for raglan sleeves, and then continued in the round for the turtleneck. This was supposed to be a cowlneck but I had decreased too much, so a turtleneck it was.
Added some cables at the raglan decreases for fun.
Soft like a bunny against my neck! I love you Malabrigo. I love you.
And that's all! Easy as pie. My first sweater since March 2006, yikes. I'll have to do this more often.
Filed Under: Completed Projects | Tunic Sweater
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Over the weekend we got a tree. They were selling them just a couple of blocks from our place so we were able pick it out and then carry it back, me holding the trunk, Duck holding the tip. We pretended we had just cut it down ourselves.
We don't have a tree every year, and so we don't have a lot of ornaments. The ones we do have we bought during after-Christmas sales at Michaels, and even then I don't like spending my money that way. So I'm always trying to find other ways to decorate the tree without breaking the bank.
I came across these beautiful letterpress gift tags at Black Ink the other day. They come in a package of 5, complete with little holes punched at top and a small packet of pretty string. The paper is thick, the design is simple, but all in all way too nice to be used as gift tags.
So I repurposed them into ornaments.
Yay.
Filed Under: House
Friday, December 07, 2007
Here is the continuation of the Domesticat House Tour.
Filed Under: House
Tuesday, December 04, 2007
Thank you so much for all your comments about the kitchen. I'm looking forward to sharing more of the house. As soon as it's clean. We're in the process of hanging stuff up on the walls and I don't know WHY but the simple act of attempting to hammer in a little nail at various desired points has turned the entire living room upside down. You think oh, this'll take just a second to hang...until you realize this certain nail is not strong enough, or maybe invisible fishing string would work better - until it breaks on you - or you realize you need a ladder because the ceiling's much much higher in the new place, but you gave away the ladder to your brother-in-law because there was nowhere to store it here, so you have to wait until your downstairs neighbor comes home so you can borrow hers but she went away for the weekend. So three days later, all the tools are still out, furniture's askew, and nothing's been hung. Ergh. This is why I'm SO GLAD we don't have to do any major renovations. We really stink at house handiwork.
Hopefully knitting handiwork is another story.
I'm trying to finish up these socks by Christmas time. I have 3 mateless socks so far for 3 in-laws, each knit in Silk Garden Lite, each in their own colorways.
I was in pretty good shape to finish by Christmas until I decided I really wanted to finish my Malabrigo sweater first. Priority defaults to Me.
 So isn't this photo just...weird? Like I took a bad fall down the stairs and my front is now my back. Anyway, I finally settled on yoking it: knit two sleeves separately, in the round with dpns, then joined them to the body stitches to start knitting the round again. I'm doing raglan sleeves and added a little 4-stitch cable to the mix, for a tiny textural/visual pop against all the stockinette.
I plan to knit a cowl neck, not sure yet how wide or thick. I still have half a skein left to finish up the yoke and a whole 200+ yard skein after that so I have leeway to decide as I knit. Love the Malabrigo and the yardage. At the end of the day this sweater will only require 4 skeins.
The only thing that kind of bugs is that you can tell where one skein of yarn starts and a new one begins because the colors among the skeins are not the same. Ah well. Design feature. Aside from that, I am very very very pleased with the way this is fitting so far. Snug and warm but not too tight.
Filed Under: Socks | Tunic Sweater
Friday, November 30, 2007
I is ready to share.
Filed Under: House
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
What's better than autumn in New England, with plump, friendly squirrels burrowing and hopping on thick golden carpets of fallen maple and gingko leaves?
Fall at its finest in the Boston Public Garden.
When you don't have to rake a single one of them. As I'm walking along the pile of leaves just outside our door, I am
warmed by the knowledge that each week, courtesy of our newly bloated
property tax dollars, there will be that trusty street sweeper coming
by to clean away all the detritus, and that our weekends of endlessly
filling and stomping dry leaves into Home Depot refuse bags are over,
oh so over, to be replaced by the less chore-y task of strolling
to and through the Public Gardens or the Commons and enjoying the
autumn leaves the way they should be enjoyed: by sight, by smell. Not
by rake.
So it's been 4 months since we ditched our suburban house for digs in the city and we are loving every. single. second of it. I don't miss our old house. At all. Right now as I sit here, SOCKLESS, in a T-SHIRT, with the heat cranked up to keep the place at a constant 72 degrees (and we don't even have a choice about that! No thermostat!), I think about the couple now at our old house and imagine what they're saying to each other as they're discovering that they've just bought an oversized ice-box, and oil prices are at an all time high. They're probably not high-fiving. Because they're fingers are all swollen and it would hurt.
In the new place, there are no weeds to pull. I mean is this Shangri-La or what?! This has been the extent of my gardening so far:
Planting bulbs - amaryllis and paperwhites - in pots to be brought indoors. This year I bought somewhere around 60 paperwhite bulbs, and have planted maybe half of them so far, in soil, or rocks, or sea glass. I'm hoping they'll begin blooming near Christmas time because there is nothing quite so nice as fragrant white paperwhite blossoms to add more holiday cheer.
So, in general I haven't really talked much about our new place, except for the mantle. I love that thing. I get a couple of emails now and then from people asking how I'm liking it, and I'm fine with talking about it one on one, but with the general public...We're so happy and feel so incredibly lucky that we get to live the way we do, but do you really want to hear about it? Because maybe I'll come across as an arrogant douchebag, and apparently that would be just about the worst thing in the world for strangers to think me a douchebag. And then there's that creepy feeling of being voyeured...I should really quit thinking so much. If you haven't noticed, my writing here as been few and far between as lately I do this back and forth in my head and then censor myself into silence. Dude, WHAT is the big deal?? This is a blog is it not? Stay tuned for more douchebaggery!
Filed Under: Life
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Oh it's been a long loooong time since I've had a finished sweater in my knitting portfolio. I've been trying though.
Here are 2 of the 4 skeins of heavyweight Socks That Rock yarn I bought to make the Rambling Rose Cardigan from the IK Winter 2006 issue. I think the magenta/pink cardigan in the magazine is a little jarring, a little not my style, too much cotton candy and Hawaiian Punch, like a junior varsity cheerleader threw up all over it. So I'll be taking the cardi towards more of an Edgar-Allan-Poe-ish direction: Pond Scum (pond scum!) and Haida, from the new Raven Series.
Here is a tunic sweater, knit in the round with Malabrigo worsted, that has been stalling at the underarms for several weeks now. I can't decide how to proceed next, mostly because I don't know what kind of sleeves I want...and also because I don't know what kind of new knitting technique I want to try. If any at all. Cast on more stitches for capped sleeves, and then continue knitting in the round? Divide for front and back, working separately, and then seam raglan sleeves to it? Long sleeves or short sleeves or 3/4 sleeves? Make it a vest? Steek it (eee no)? Yoke it? I just want to finish it with the least amount of thought as possible, really. Wish I had just done this from the top down.
Until I finish those up, I have a few things that will tie me over, cuz I just scored me my most favorite thing in the world: a sweater on sale at anthropologie.
Let's be honest here, it's still kind of expensive even with the mark down. anthropologie is like that, hit or miss with the styles and the prices. But let's be honest again: those 4 skeins of yarn cost more than this finished cardigan (which totally looks handknit, by the way), and Rambling Rose cardigan, assuming that it will actually turn out to my liking after spending 10,000 hours to knit it, does not have penguins for pockets now does it?
Filed Under: General Knitting | Tunic Sweater | Yarn Stash
Monday, November 19, 2007
I just have nothing to talk about these days. But before I forget, I have a public service announcement to make on behalf of my cousin who lives in Denver. She has a new copy of Favorite Socks: 25 Timeless Designs from IK that she'd like to swap for purple or purplish sock yarn; no preference as to brand. Surely these must be one or two knitters out there who do not yet own this book. Surely. And I'm sure if you wanted to swap something else she'd be open to that as well.
So if you're interested, just zap me a comment.
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Now I'm going to show photos that I took today of random stuff around the house, because really I cannot think of a single thing to talk about. Not that there hasn't been much to talk about, but the manner in which those things would be talked about would be very low-quality, considering how my brain has lost all of its writing/blogging mojo. These days I've been sitting around alternately between Why Do I Blog? and Do You Really Care? so much that my CPU crashes and it takes a lot of coaxing to restart. So annoying, all this teen-angst stuff. So let's not talk about it anymore.
Let's talk about what's on the needles. Lots of random stuff.
There are thick socks, one plain, one ribbed, in Silk Garden Lite, hopefully to be finished in time for xmas. There is a brown lump which is the start of Forecast. I think I might be allergic to the wool I'm using, and if it is an allergy it's a weird one. Everytime I put down the knitting, random parts of my body start to itch like crazy. The hairline, behind the ear, soles of the feet, back of the knees, shoulder blades, that meaty area of the thumb. The yarn is Peruvian wool that I got years ago from elann.com. I'm still performing tests to see if this really is an allergy or if it's all in my head.
It's 11 am and I'm still in my Yummy Sushi Pajamas. In case you're wondering, it is1:45 pm now and I've switched out of the top, put on some eye shadow and lip gloss, but am still wearing the pj pants. And they're called Yummy Sushi Pajamas because that's what Buffy called them in a season 5 episode of Buffy the VampireSlayer several years back. She wore these exact pj's which I loved so much that Duck secretly tracked them down and I received them for Christmas. It was the best gift EVER.
This is Underdog. He's about 30 years old, and belonged to Duck. He's a superhero, piggy bank and bouncer all rolled into one. Fun AND functional! These days he's mostly a bouncer, or a doorstop for the bathroom where the litterbox is. We had an incident several months back when we were out of the house all day, the heavy door closed by itself and Veebs waited as long as he could before he made a huge, steaming pile of an accident in the corner of the kitchen. It is still unclear who was unhappier about the situation, me or the cat. So now we use Underdog to make sure that doesn't happen again.
My first orchids. My mom used to keep dozens of them and even though she has the greenest of all thumbs, she never had much luck with orchids. How she would try. So I approach them with a little trepidation. But now with a warmer place (unlike our old house) that also gets a decent amount of light (unlike our old house), I'm hoping I will kill these later rather than sooner.
And now, my MANTLE!
The mantle is an original detail in the house (over a hundred years old!) and is made of marble. We will probably not use the fireplace because if the entire street were to burn the guilt would never leave me, but how I love the mantle! How I love to put stuff on it! In front of it! Next to it! This weekend we went to the garden center and I went a little crazy, and so did Duck because he so did not want to be there. I got a pretty garland of fake little berries, paperwhite bulbs to force, amaryllis bulbs to force, poinsettas and those orchids. The ferns I bought in May when we were selling the house. I'm surprised they're still alive. It could be because for once our condo is always at a nice and toasty 72 F, which is nearly a whole 20 degrees more than what we kept our thermostat at our old house. I love having the heat included in our condo fee. I love having heat.
THE END.
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Don't forget to let me know if you'd like to swap for the Favorite Socks book! Til next time...
Filed Under: House
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