A Little Yarn On The Side

Some friends of ours got married on Long Island this past weekend, so bright and early Tuesday morning, we learned that airport security in Boise opens at 4:30 in the morning.  To be fair, I could have lived without this knowledge, but when you live in a smaller city, there aren't always a lot of flight options.  If one flies out of a little airport, one is almost always sent to a big airport somewhere, and if one is traveling east from Boise, those bigger airports tend to be in a westerly direction, so flying 2 hours west to catch a flight east is pretty standard, but dreadful when one has a sore back.  I did find an airline that would send us through Minneapolis, but that's a once-a-day option.  Still, the perk to a 5:00 AM flight is that one can take a muscle relaxer and STILL be no more groggy than most of the other people on the plane.   However, it does not to wonders for knitting, so the new begonia shawl did not get a lot of attentio...

October is almost over, so I've been thinking about my crazy goals for next year. I really like the idea of "Me Made Mondays," so that is going to be the big one.  I'm toying with upping the ante to say pajamas don't count, because what I would like this to do is to challenge me to make more clothing, which would MAYBE finally shrink the fabric stash.  And should it be something different every Monday? THAT would really make it interesting.  and how crazy do I have to make this challenge to finally see a dent in the stash?

Do you ever just look around your crafting area and think, "Wow!  What happened here?"

It's now been 100 days since I lost bought yarn. Why isn't my stash smaller?

So I'd like to pretend that I'm so organized that I always order Christmas gifts two months early, but I think we all know that's the not really the case.  I worked it out this year because I'd figured out what to do for people who don't get handmade gifts and wanted to order before I forgot what I'd come up with.  But it looks good, right? I AM ON THE LAST REPEAT FOR THE SHAWL!  I am going to graft the ends together instead of sewing them, which may be interesting, then I'll figure out how the pattern says to join the edging to the main part.  And if I can resist the temptation to set it all aside in order to cast on a new pair of socks, I could actually finish it.....................   Ahem..........

While it wasn't the ONLY reason, let's call it a perk that the ball of yarn was more than half used up and I have now used up another ball from stash and joined the final one to the shawl.  And  now that the new skein is in a big, troublesome snarl, I see why the last one was wound into a ball.....

It might have been nice to use that sort of once-in-a-lifetime event to, say, win the lottery, but since I don't gamble (except for not always checking gauge) and have never bought a lottery ticket, that was probably pretty unlikely.  So I'll settle for: More lollipop ornaments!  There are now 16 of them, and I swear it wasn't just to get 4 quick finished projects.  Partially, of course, but also to see if this was a good way to use fabric when it was cut by drunk monkeys.  Honestly, both sides are that crooked, and I can't even lay it out badly enough to figure out how they did it.  I'm using 1-inch strips the full width of the fabric for lollipops, so uneven strips don't work quite right for those, but it will be fine for when I graduate to fabric-covered bowls and baskets.  I was tempted to try one now, but that will be a good carrot for when a couple sewing projects are finished. I'm getting a little extra crafting time this week because I ...

I am working on a knitting WIP!  I started this shawl 2 years ago, and I think I might have set it aside because knitting 28 32-row repeats of edging is incredibly boring.  Frankly, quite understandable if I did.  BUT, I picked it up again this week and have now done SEVEN pattern repeats, so there are only 7 pattern repeats left, and then some sort of join and it will be finished!  Leaving me only 20 WIPs to finish.  ONLY....

This morning I did some tidying, and under normal circumstances I might be canning today, but the record-breaking heat is continuing, so I'm going to wait until it isn't almost 90 degrees--which might be Monday.  So today, I'm working on a new ornament.  I saw these at Art in the Park, and thought they were adorable.   I came home and found a tutorial on YouTube, because I was too lazy to figure them out on my own.  The stick posed a bit of a challenge.  I thought they would be lollipop sticks, but they're too thin.  I found a cookie stick that was the right thickness, but Andy cut them in half for me as apparently when one puts cookies on a stick, it's a long stick.  I didn't know cookies were now a thing-on-a-stick, but they do work well for this. It's a glue gun project, and I (of course) promptly burned myself, and I've already glued one to my cutting mat, but I'm slowly getting the hang of them.  Sort of.  And it's a relatively q...

TWO scarves, washed and blocking: and we're just going to pretend like they're lying flat, okay?  I've been happier with finished projects, but I am really happy they ARE finished projects.  In fact, I was so excited that I cast on a new Begonia Swirl shawl in the yarn I'd put in my birthday box: One thing about trying to work through stash before buying more yarn, I'm hoping that by the time I make it through the 10 skeins of this I started out with (an incident involving the end of my first year of cold sheeping and a discontinued yarn--we try not to talk about it much.....), I'm hoping that I will have learned that variegated lace yarns almost ALWAYS look better in the skein than in the finished project.   But maybe it will look good on THIS scarf.  I'll wear it anyway because I love the colors, but there were probably better choices of yarn to stockpile...... I also spent a little bit of time with the latest colorwork ornament.  Being October,...

The good news:  The grey scarf is done. The bad news:  it rolls BADLY.  I altered the pattern to include 2 rows of seed stitch on the sides and to eliminate the dreaded tubular cast-on, so for a while I was kicking myself that my version had somehow caused the rolling, but I started doing Elizabeth Zimmermann's sewn bind-off on the maroon one, and it is rolling as well, so it's just the pattern.  I'll block them severely, but blocking never stops rolling due to how a pattern is done. But it's too late to do anything about it, so I'll just hope they like tubular scarves.  I bought the yarn because it was a silk blend with lovely drape, but I might add a scrap from my washaway stabilizer (which is starch) to minimize the rolling a bit.  In other project-going-badly news, the top-stitching is looking pretty messy when it crosses over the wales of the corduroy.  I think a second row of top-stitching will even it out, but reinforced stitching wo...

Yes, the wedding for which the scarf is intended is indeed this month, but I'm trying not to stress today.  Tuesday I went to the gym, THEN made and canned 20 pints of chicken soup--plus freezing some--so yesterday I really needed to rest, which involved a mind-numbing amount of knitting.  Or maybe that was the pain medication.  At any rate, I'm almost done with the 4th 24-row pattern repeat (out of 5).  Of course, I still need to fix the first scarf as well, but I am trying to talk myself down from the ceiling here.  After all, one has a year AFTER the wedding to still get a wedding gift to someone without being a complete twit.  Emily Post said so, though maybe not the "twit" part. So this morning,   Theo and I are having coffee in the sewing room while I finish the first batch of top-stitching on the new jacket.  This isn't a very accurate picture of the color, so let me just say that I'm really pleased how the pink thread is looking ag...