A Little Yarn On The Side

"It was dreadful," says knitter, Toni Sutton, when asked about her recent foray into the WIP Wilderness.  "It had been a long and brutal battle already.  There were bodies everywhere. "The sweater was there in the distance--lurking.  I could see the results of my last failed effort--that woolly Victorian collar: "It was ghastly.  I mean, a sweater collar that can actually pick up satellite television?  Can you imagine the horror?" When asked, Ms. Sutton admits to some pretty unorthodox methods. "Several knitters had tried the traditional methods--smaller needles, changing the neckline--but the results still weren't good.  Keeping the pattern remotely intact just wasn't enough to control this WIP.  It was time for some alterations.  I took the cable down to a lopsided 5-stitch pattern, then switched one of the stitches to a purl on the third row from the end.  Very unusual, but nothing else would work." Still, even with all ...

Tomorrow is Finishing Friday.  It's me, that darned ribbed yoke sweater, and some audio books.  Someone is going to come out victorious.......

For some reason, when Hagrid pulled out knitting in the first Harry Potter book, it made me absurdly happy.  I don't know what he was knitting, or if he ever finished it, but it was just this little glimpse of a shared interest and it made me happy.  So, I'm thinking that maybe more of our literature could use a little knitting--you know, to make it more accessible....which of course led me to......  Romeo and Juliet :  The besotted Juliet knits her beloved a gorgeous sweater in an all-over cable pattern, which invokes the dreaded Boyfriend Sweater curse and Romeo immediately dumps her, and they both live on to marry others and live to ripe, old age. Gone With The Wind: When Rhett leaves Scarlett after not giving a damn, Scarlett remembers she still has her beloved Tara, which she converts into an alpaca farm and she makes a fortune selling Damn Yankee Yarn, which will later inspire a musical of a similar name. Wizard of Oz:  Dorothy doesn't end up with th...

The slip-stitching of the binding is going pretty slowly (though compared to the THREE AND A HALF YEARS that the rest has taken, it's pretty zippy), but at least Calisto is getting some use out of it as a yoga mat.

As most of you have probably noticed, America is in a bit of a turmoil right now.  If I were feeling like a rabble-rouser, I'm mention that this is generally what happens when a Democrat is president because the Republicans are sore losers & if they can't fry a man for lack of military service (which becomes a nonissue once there's a Republican president who has no military background) or whether or not he smoked pot in his life (and wouldn't it explain a lot if we discovered that Bush smoked pot WHILE in office?), then they go after him for us being in a war that his predecessor started.  BUT, I'm feeling all warm & fuzzy and bipartisan tonight, so I won't.  I will say that we are having some issues here in the good old USA, and if no one else is going to try to do anything about it, I will.  So, here it is, Toni's PLAN FOR PEACE:  * Starting tomorrow, for one month everyone in the country is to take up knitting.  They may discuss knitting, ask k...

*  Every group has its sadists.  In the knitting world, we call them "designers." *  There is no cat so old or so lazy that it won't unravel your lace knitting as soon as your back is turned. *  Knitting probably isn't the answer to every problem, no matter how much I think it must be. *  It's wrong to think badly of friends who choose to live in warm climates where knitted woolly items are completely useless. *  Next time I'm feeling just a little too cocky about my knitting, I will pull out that darned ribbed yoke pullover again. *  Learning to laugh about knitting is probably much healthier than shoving a problem sweater into the blender.....and less damaging to appliances. *  Being allergic to animals is probably actually a good thing.  It's the only thing keeping me from trying to keep an alpaca in the back yard. *  If you want your obsession with knitting to seem "normal," convert others. *  I will never be abl...

So remember when I had all those pictures of unfinished quilts? Yeah, I didn't exactly show you all of them.  This is a quilt I started as a gift for one of my bridesmaids.  As you might remember, Andy and I just celebrated our third wedding anniversary, so this one is nicely aged.  As am I, frankly.  Anyway, it needed one more row of quilting through the center, then it was time for.....  the binding.  Now, there are a lot of ways to do edging.  There's the one continuous strip--which looks nice and is clever, but I ended up with a seriously squished corner.  Then there's the cleverly-cut-enough-material-to-fold-over-for-the-binding method, which as it turns out requires a bit better concept of straight lines than I seem to have.  Then there's the cut 2 longer strips, two shorter strips, and sew them on one at a time approach, which is my normal choice.  I however, opted to forgo all of these and strike out on my own, creating a ...