Zombies 4 Life

Wow, what a miserable week this past one has been. Quite a number of folks at the office, including me and Dan, were stricken by a really virulent flu-type infection. Everyone's symptoms ran along similar paths, although some folks had throbbing headaches while some of us had fevers.

Five days after it first hit me, I'm still weak and lethargic. Feeding the dog and watering my plants this morning was exhausting. Blech. I hate this.

Spent some time working on my sweater, Sunshine. The Knit-Along ends in a couple of weeks and I have just finished the body and begun one of the sleeves. Fortunately, I set aside two skeins of my Karaoke Mermaid Mix whose color stripes begin exactly at the point I need for each sleeve. Yay!

If I weren't so tired from the flu (or whatever this was), I'd have gotten it done by now. Oh, well. It's going along faster than I had anticipated, being my first sweater and all.

Fortunately, it has an inset of lace down the sleeves so that I don't need to count row by tedious row to match both of my sleeves. Instead, I'll be keeping count of the pattern, which is rows of 10. Still counting, but much less difficult for the math-challenged such as myself!

We're having Chinese food delivered tonight. Neither of us is up to cooking or going to pick something up.

Except maybe brains. We zombies love them.

Hmmm....

Apparently the comments are slightly weird, occasionally, although they work sometimes. I have no idea how to fix them. This is one of them thar pre-made templates so when I look at the code, all I see is #@$!%%!!!

And that's what I say while looking at it, too.

Maybe I'll just switch to a different template and see if that works. Too tired to do so tonight.

Sunshine (the sweater) is at a dividing point, where I put the sleeve bits onto bits of waste yarn while I finish off the body bits. Later on, I come back to do the sleeve bits.

Dan tried on the sock I finished tonight, hereinafter referred to as The Sock That Was Too Small. It fit along the foot, but the heel and the leg portions were short. So I did what any good knitter does; I frogged it.

Cast on for them again but will begin actual knitting on them tomorrow. Maybe.

Sunshine

...on my shoulders...in this photo:

Sunshine...on my shoulders...looks so lovely!

((sorry, John Denver, I couldn't help it...but I'm not the one who named this pattern anyway))

I'm using a soy/wool blend with beautiful teal-purple colors. It's called Mermaid Mix, although after looking at the photos I thought, "It looks more like Oil Slick." But it's very soft and gorgeous.

The only problem is that Sunshine is a long-sleeved cardigan and that means I will be fretting about matching colors on both sleeves with the body. That won't be very easy. So I'm keeping open the possibility that I may need to buy something solid to form a large "stripe" on the sleeve.

Also right now: knitting a hat for myself, about 80% done on my second Lady Eleanor and bought grey wool to make Dan's a pair of socks. Plus the skulls baby blanket for Jack, who turned one last month.

We'll see how it goes. Oddly, the stuff I knit for myself seems to be taking forever. I guess it's the lack of urgency as I don't need to finish them for Christmas or something. Maybe I need to set a personal goal to finish things!

Knitting Along

I've really enjoyed knitting; I think that's not much of a surprise to anyone who's been reading this here blog! But I've never really tackled anything particularly difficult.

When I think about all the projects I've been doing, they sort of grow one into the next in terms of techniques. The first baby blanket I knit, for Amy and Isaac, was pretty simply constructed on a diagonal with lacy yarn overs. I learned how to do increases and later realized all the yarn overs in that blanket are done incorrectly! I'd just learned how to knit Continental and was still shaky on the differences between that and the English method.

Now I know better :)

Once my friends stopped having babies, I began branching out into scarves with different yarn types. Poor Candyce received one of the experiments: a super bulky purple keyhole scarf that, though I used huge needles and made "skinnier" than normal, is still dense enough to choke a llama (and I'll re-knit if for you, Can, if you unearth it!).

Each project helped me see how stitches ought to sit; how increases and decreases matched up; how to pick up stitches; how to cast on in different ways. I've been on Ravelry for a year now and it opened up a whole new world of projects and possibilities!

My "stash" of yarn is now more wool and natural fibers than the boxes of acrylics that I had gotten from Suz, via Broos. I've knit with alpaca, silk, wool, soy and now have a hank of yarn made of banana fiber. Bananas! I've learned how to wind hanks of yarn into neat center-pull balls.

I've further learned that it takes viewing both The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi to wind 1,400 yards of laceweight yarn into a ball by hand. =)

My foray into fingerless gloves taught me about kntting small things in the round, which naturally led to the year-end sock project. My new socks are nice and warm; I've worn them several times now. Can't wait to make more, to try out more techniques.

And so, I am participating in a Knit-Along (abbreviated as KAL, because knitters are funny that way) that takes obscure-but-cool projects and knits them at the same time. It provides a support group of folks who are doing the same project while not confining one to knitting at the same time and place as everyone else.

I chose to knit Sunshine, a cute pullover. Hopefully all the techniques I've learned thus far will help me make it fit for a two-armed human to wear!

How I spent my day

I knit, therefore I purled.

Knitting into Fall

I finally finished my Lady Eleanor scarf and have ordered some Noro Silk Garden to make another.

Cheapskate that I am, I only bought the Noro because Webs was having a closeout sale on some of its colors, so I got 12 skeins of colorway 246 for $5.79 per skein, instead of the usual $10.95 per.

I've also finished my birthday gifts for Emma, spawn of SteveD. I made a little hat featuring a merry band of owls and a pair of mittens that actually turned out. I showed Steve the photo of the first mitten and he said it looked like a condom. :P Just goes to show that his mind is in the gutter.

Meanwhile, I also have some lovely Knit Picks Imagination fingering yarn and spent my morning browsing through scarf and wrap patterns, trying to choose the right one. I think I've found it. I'm going to make an expanded version of Brooke's Column of Leaves scarf. Since my yarn's fingering weight, I can possibly make a triple repeat of the pattern without it being too heavy. We'll see how it goes.

And in other other news, Steve and I finally heard back about our book chapter. Friday I spent rushing around via email begging for the okay to use snippets of various things to show as samples in our chapter. It's funny how we've been waiting for over six months since we sent in our draft and now that the editors got back with us, we have to turn everything in on Monday.

On the bright side, the chapter didn't seem so frighteningly disjointed as it had the last time I read it. Apparently it's approved with time ;)

Zombies 4 Life

Wow, what a miserable week this past one has been. Quite a number of folks at the office, including me and Dan, were stricken by a really virulent flu-type infection. Everyone's symptoms ran along similar paths, although some folks had throbbing headaches while some of us had fevers.

Five days after it first hit me, I'm still weak and lethargic. Feeding the dog and watering my plants this morning was exhausting. Blech. I hate this.

Spent some time working on my sweater, Sunshine. The Knit-Along ends in a couple of weeks and I have just finished the body and begun one of the sleeves. Fortunately, I set aside two skeins of my Karaoke Mermaid Mix whose color stripes begin exactly at the point I need for each sleeve. Yay!

If I weren't so tired from the flu (or whatever this was), I'd have gotten it done by now. Oh, well. It's going along faster than I had anticipated, being my first sweater and all.

Fortunately, it has an inset of lace down the sleeves so that I don't need to count row by tedious row to match both of my sleeves. Instead, I'll be keeping count of the pattern, which is rows of 10. Still counting, but much less difficult for the math-challenged such as myself!

We're having Chinese food delivered tonight. Neither of us is up to cooking or going to pick something up.

Except maybe brains. We zombies love them.

Hmmm....

Apparently the comments are slightly weird, occasionally, although they work sometimes. I have no idea how to fix them. This is one of them thar pre-made templates so when I look at the code, all I see is #@$!%%!!!

And that's what I say while looking at it, too.

Maybe I'll just switch to a different template and see if that works. Too tired to do so tonight.

Sunshine (the sweater) is at a dividing point, where I put the sleeve bits onto bits of waste yarn while I finish off the body bits. Later on, I come back to do the sleeve bits.

Dan tried on the sock I finished tonight, hereinafter referred to as The Sock That Was Too Small. It fit along the foot, but the heel and the leg portions were short. So I did what any good knitter does; I frogged it.

Cast on for them again but will begin actual knitting on them tomorrow. Maybe.

Sunshine

...on my shoulders...in this photo:

Sunshine...on my shoulders...looks so lovely!

((sorry, John Denver, I couldn't help it...but I'm not the one who named this pattern anyway))

I'm using a soy/wool blend with beautiful teal-purple colors. It's called Mermaid Mix, although after looking at the photos I thought, "It looks more like Oil Slick." But it's very soft and gorgeous.

The only problem is that Sunshine is a long-sleeved cardigan and that means I will be fretting about matching colors on both sleeves with the body. That won't be very easy. So I'm keeping open the possibility that I may need to buy something solid to form a large "stripe" on the sleeve.

Also right now: knitting a hat for myself, about 80% done on my second Lady Eleanor and bought grey wool to make Dan's a pair of socks. Plus the skulls baby blanket for Jack, who turned one last month.

We'll see how it goes. Oddly, the stuff I knit for myself seems to be taking forever. I guess it's the lack of urgency as I don't need to finish them for Christmas or something. Maybe I need to set a personal goal to finish things!

Knitting Along

I've really enjoyed knitting; I think that's not much of a surprise to anyone who's been reading this here blog! But I've never really tackled anything particularly difficult.

When I think about all the projects I've been doing, they sort of grow one into the next in terms of techniques. The first baby blanket I knit, for Amy and Isaac, was pretty simply constructed on a diagonal with lacy yarn overs. I learned how to do increases and later realized all the yarn overs in that blanket are done incorrectly! I'd just learned how to knit Continental and was still shaky on the differences between that and the English method.

Now I know better :)

Once my friends stopped having babies, I began branching out into scarves with different yarn types. Poor Candyce received one of the experiments: a super bulky purple keyhole scarf that, though I used huge needles and made "skinnier" than normal, is still dense enough to choke a llama (and I'll re-knit if for you, Can, if you unearth it!).

Each project helped me see how stitches ought to sit; how increases and decreases matched up; how to pick up stitches; how to cast on in different ways. I've been on Ravelry for a year now and it opened up a whole new world of projects and possibilities!

My "stash" of yarn is now more wool and natural fibers than the boxes of acrylics that I had gotten from Suz, via Broos. I've knit with alpaca, silk, wool, soy and now have a hank of yarn made of banana fiber. Bananas! I've learned how to wind hanks of yarn into neat center-pull balls.

I've further learned that it takes viewing both The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi to wind 1,400 yards of laceweight yarn into a ball by hand. =)

My foray into fingerless gloves taught me about kntting small things in the round, which naturally led to the year-end sock project. My new socks are nice and warm; I've worn them several times now. Can't wait to make more, to try out more techniques.

And so, I am participating in a Knit-Along (abbreviated as KAL, because knitters are funny that way) that takes obscure-but-cool projects and knits them at the same time. It provides a support group of folks who are doing the same project while not confining one to knitting at the same time and place as everyone else.

I chose to knit Sunshine, a cute pullover. Hopefully all the techniques I've learned thus far will help me make it fit for a two-armed human to wear!

How I spent my day

I knit, therefore I purled.

Knitting into Fall

I finally finished my Lady Eleanor scarf and have ordered some Noro Silk Garden to make another.

Cheapskate that I am, I only bought the Noro because Webs was having a closeout sale on some of its colors, so I got 12 skeins of colorway 246 for $5.79 per skein, instead of the usual $10.95 per.

I've also finished my birthday gifts for Emma, spawn of SteveD. I made a little hat featuring a merry band of owls and a pair of mittens that actually turned out. I showed Steve the photo of the first mitten and he said it looked like a condom. :P Just goes to show that his mind is in the gutter.

Meanwhile, I also have some lovely Knit Picks Imagination fingering yarn and spent my morning browsing through scarf and wrap patterns, trying to choose the right one. I think I've found it. I'm going to make an expanded version of Brooke's Column of Leaves scarf. Since my yarn's fingering weight, I can possibly make a triple repeat of the pattern without it being too heavy. We'll see how it goes.

And in other other news, Steve and I finally heard back about our book chapter. Friday I spent rushing around via email begging for the okay to use snippets of various things to show as samples in our chapter. It's funny how we've been waiting for over six months since we sent in our draft and now that the editors got back with us, we have to turn everything in on Monday.

On the bright side, the chapter didn't seem so frighteningly disjointed as it had the last time I read it. Apparently it's approved with time ;)