A Little Yarn On The Side

Well, embroidering.   But for the last couple weeks, the sewing room has been overtaken by the political consulting work, so it feels good to have it back to being a craft room for the day.  I'm even feeling a great sense of accomplishment because I had to locate the hoop (hallway), stabilizer (guest room), embroidery unit and embroidery thread (master bedroom), so it's really like a crafting scavenger hunt.  A friend of mine just adopted two puppies, and we are having a puppy shower for her tomorrow, so I wanted to make something for the new arrivals.  Originally I thought about some sort of doggy Christmas stockings, but was running low on time, so I ran by Joanns yesterday to pick up some dog print fleece.  Theo was absolutely horrified by the idea at first but clean, fur-less fabric proved too much for him this morning. I've trimmed the edges with a scalloped blade on my rotary cutter, which I bought a while ago and hadn't used.  It mad...

Last night I finished the brioche scarf, which I didn't think I would get a chance to do, but Andy and I got sucked into a movie and ended up staying up MUCH later than we intended.  Having the television on helps me fall asleep because it interrupts my thought patterns and helps me disengage, which reading doesn't do--not even the most boring books.  Movies usually work (unless they involve screaming, explosions, or music, which are luckily never combined in a single movie), but I'd borrowed "The Reader" from the library, and for the first 30 minutes or so, I thought it was perfect as it seemed to be a retelling of Lolita which I wasn't finding riveting, but then we got sucked in, and I even had time to cast on a sleeve for the next baby sweater before the movie ended.  I decided to start with the sleeves so I could knit the body in one piece and join it all together for the yoke--and because I didn't think 11:00PM was a great time for me to be try...

......very, very simple knitting.  Something that requires no thought, no pattern, and can be picked up and put down in a flash.  So.... there is a new scarf on the needles.  It's a free pattern called Lacy Brioche , and it's just one row over and over again until you can't stand it.  Combined with a variegated yarn, it's like the knitting equivalent of a lava lamp--soothing, subtly changing, and very pretty.  It's working so well with the variegated lace weight that I see another one of these in my future as well...........there's a slipped stitch effect in the pattern that stops the obvious pooling that so often happens with variegated yarns.   Thank heavens--I had originally purchased 4 hanks of this yarn thinking I would make a shawl BEFORE realizing that I hate the way variegated yarns look in shawls, so it's nice to find patterns that work in this yarn.  In spite of the puddling problems, I do love the colors of this yarn and would never ...

Bless baby sweaters!!!! Sweater number TWO is done (except for buttons, which I'll find when I get the sewing room put back together), so now I'm only about one and a half sweater behind.  That sounds better, right?  I'm going to work on the collar and band for the blue sweater which is down to just the bands and a few seams.  Maybe finishing this and another baby sweater will get me back on track.........?

Even though I ended up having to work most of yesterday, I did manage to finish the current lace scarf,   (sorry--old picture.  Andy is upgraded my laptop today and I didn't want to have to learn the updated picture thing just yet)  which adds 440 yards to my yardage for the year, and then I finished the first ball of yarn for the current baby sweater, so just one week into the second quarter and I have used up 25 skeins of yarn and 5,472 yards of yarn.  Maybe I could still reach 20,000............................