A Little Yarn On The Side

1. Circulate a medical report linking prolonged wool exposure to a strange tropical disease known as Ovinus, which causes a bizarre eye twitch and a passion for hot pink eyelash yarn. 2. Take your knitting out in public and agree with everyone when they comment on your lovely crocheting. 3. At tonight's Stitch-n-Bitch, suggest forming a Knitting Mafia to take care of things, because those acrylic-only knitters are just getting out of hand. 4. Take a dead moth to your local yarn shop and plant it in the most expensive merino. 5. Write a blog entry saying that Elizabeth Zimmermann really didn't know that much about knitting, and you don't see what all the fuss was about. 6. Find someone with a garter-stitch fun-fur scarf and loudly accuse them of stealing your copyrighted design. 7. Sit down with your grandmother and browse the "naughty" patterns on Ravelry. 8. Dig out your nicest alpaca yarn to knit with and tell everyone it's spun raccoon...

So, under close kitty supervision I decided to lay out the latest quilt blocks (see, I have been doing something since I finished that book), and see what blocks I still needed & how many more I thought I should make and for future reference: This quilt would be SOOOOOOOOO much easier if one of the materials didn't have a directional print on it--and there would be less foul language in the sewing room. Probably. The blocks create this nice pinwheel effect but for fun, I decided to try laying it out another way. When I uploaded that photo I thought I must have broken my camera. Looks all blurry, doesn't it? Nope, it's just the way the blocks make it look. It's bad enough that the print all has to be going the same direction, but it's printed crookedly on the fabric, and I think an entire quilt looking like this would drive someone crazy. We'll be sticking with the original layout. I have no intention of ending up in the funny farm from quilting this thi...

While digging through some older boxes in the sewing room, I ran acrossa sweater that I seem to have abandoned after the back was finished: Is it just me, or does the color pattern just scream 1990s??

You may blame ALL of this weekend's lack of knitting (and sleep) on Mr. Jeffrey Deaver. I was seduced by one of his books-- C old Moon --and while I can normally knit while reading, when I am stressed out about where & when a serial killer is going to strike next my gauge gets so tight that I can no longer get the knitting OFF the needles. There may even be permanent yarn grooves now. Thank heavens I have finished the book and can return to my knitting......and Andy has temporarily approved the use of a nightlight.......

I was having such a fun time with the striping of the Baby Surprise Jacket that it set me thinking....wouldn't that make a cute baby blanket....???? So, ignoring the 13 WIPS already in progress, I have started this I might get tricky and make it rectangular--or just square--and maybe a crocheted border in blue? I think it's pretty cute. The cats are a little less enthusiastic... I don't know what's wrong with them--they just don't like knitting half as much as they like sewing.....maybe it's because I won't let them play with the yarn.......

It is possible that I just finished a project before even mentioning it on the blog. It's a Baby Surprise Jacket, one of Elizabeth Zimmermann's most popular patterns. We're doing a BSJ knit-a-long in the EZ Fans Yahoo Group and I finished mine this morning. According to my projects page on Ravelry, I started this in January--I believe I did it to have something to knit at stoplights or in the vet clinic. I was really hoping for some cuter buttons, but out of all of these buttons nothing else matched. I had high hopes of these but the pink is just a bit too off for my taste. I always love how the back pattern differs from the front and babies are young enough not to complain about a big wide stripe going right across the rear end. Ah, those were the days..... I seem to be back in my sidekick's good graces today. Calisto is a bit afraid of the noise from the downstairs closet and all the activity, but Theo is fascinated and has been pretty disgruntled about not gett...

--which took an entire day and a great deal of measuring just to locate as the darn thing was actually within the wall where it was merrily leaking vast amounts of water through a big hole every time the outside faucet was turned on--for the general lack of knitting & blogging. Andy was able to replace it, and since it's the pipe for the OUTSIDE faucet, it is now wrapped in INSULATION, which would have probably prevented all of this in the first place. And this is our new house guest which actually has two friends down in the crawl space helping to suck up the water our little pipe problem caused. I realize construction is almost synonymous with cutting corners & doing things as cheaply as possible, but we bought a builder's OWN HOME so I would have thought he might have paid more attention, but as builders aren't actually licensed here in Idaho, maybe he never built a house before he became a builder. I did manage to ge the reversible scarf done and it looks g...